


Far From Home: The Blind Banker

by WritingsOfStardust



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crime, Drama, Family, Gen, episodic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25324153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingsOfStardust/pseuds/WritingsOfStardust
Summary: Orphaned and adopted teenager Emili Holmes teams up with her brother, Sherlock, and his flatmate, John, to solve a break-in at an investment banking firm. When their lead is found murdered, their case becomes an investigation into the high-stakes world of international smuggling.
Kudos: 2





	1. Chapter One

There were times when Mycroft complained in passing about how hard it could be to be Sherlock’s brother sometimes. The two didn’t talk very often and most of their communication was done through covert agents from Mycroft or by using Emili as a messaging service. Emili wouldn’t tell him, since the proud brother would take it as an insult, but Emili was certain that he wouldn’t last a _week_ living in her apartment.

There were advantages to sharing a building with Sherlock and John, of course. She hadn’t felt any safer with Mycroft’s security than she did knowing that there was an armed ex-vet downstairs that she actually knew. The landlady was a definite plus – Mrs. Hudson didn’t like that Emili lived without an adult, and Emili knew that she wouldn’t let Emili stay there alone if it weren’t for Sherlock and John being just a staircase away if they were ever needed. Mrs. Hudson enjoyed checking in on her and frequently brought her scones fresh out of the oven – and cookies, when she made them, but Mrs. Hudson would call them “biscuits.” Having a doctor just downstairs meant that she had generally on-call medical services. And Sherlock, who didn’t have the sleep schedule of any living animal she’d ever heard of, much less a human, liked to play his violin at odd hours during the night – which _sounded_ annoying, but when he wasn’t viciously abusing the strings with a bow that needed more rosin, the music was beautiful, and the floorboards were thick enough to muffle it into a lullaby when Em had trouble sleeping.

However, if it was hard to be Sherlock’s friend, then that was nothing compared to being his neighbor. As often as his violin helped her sleep, his activities would wake her up, and that was when he wasn’t coming up to her apartment and hitting on the door, sometimes letting himself in and giving her a panic attack when she woke up to a tall, dark figure standing over her bed, shaking her awake to tell her to get herself presentable immediately because Lestrade called or because he needed to know if she had any experience scrubbing blood out of carpets, since he needed to clean up the results of an experiment before John saw.

Emili’s privacy wasn’t a very respected thing. She locked her windows and her bedroom door, but she left her apartment door unlocked at nights in case there was an emergency. She couldn’t promise banging on her apartment door would wake her from a deep sleep, but if someone came pounding on the door five feet from her bed, she was sure to hear. She figured that if anyone was going to break in, they would get the lower rooms first, and then the gun-carrying blogger would deal with them. As a result, often when she went into her living room after sleeping in late, she would find notes placed on her kitchen counter or her laptop taken and opened up to a website and left on the couch for her to find. Several times, groceries she had _just_ replaced would go M.I.A., especially her milk and dairy products.

Then there were Sherlock’s expectations. He was his own favorite person. That honestly wasn’t much of a surprise, but he expected to have Emili’s attention and sulked when she refused to go to the morgue with him in favor of a test that needed to be done or a school assignment that needed to be written. She loved getting dragged around and involved in his detective work most of the time, but Mycroft could take that away, and one of the few demands she had to meet for the privilege involved keeping her grades up before the Holmes parents thought that Mycroft was neglecting his duties as an older brother. Which he totally was. In spite of this, he checked in fairly often – or had Anthea do so in his stead – so Emili didn’t _feel_ neglected, especially when she counted herself lucky to get a full five hours of alone time in her own home from her other sibling.

The grades had always come easily to her in America. She’d been reading long books before her school had taught her class how to read – of course those books had been at a child’s level, like the American Girl series, but it served as a good example of her readiness and willingness to learn. Moving to England didn’t change school’s difficulty unless it was in her Brit-Lit class (as she called it, short for British Literature) due to her inexperience with the country. She still excelled at writing, science, and social studies, got impressive grades in her frustrating foreign language class, and hated math with a passion, though she was on top of that course, too.

Excelling was no easy thing to do, what with a lot of her time spent on cases that Sherlock managed to solve in under forty-eight hours and babysitting the detective when he got bored. She had introduced him to Star Trek on her laptop and then hadn’t been able to get her computer away from him until he’d watched the whole series, nitpicking at the science and the tiny inaccuracies from scene to scene in makeup, clothing, or dialogue.

Emili was trying and struggling to write a paper on Jane Austen for her Brit-Lit class. She’d been meaning to read _Pride and Prejudice_ for years but had never gotten around to it, so she chose to do her literary review on Austen. That meant she had to read the book first. No big deal. She got a recommendation for a bookstore from John and went and picked up a copy. Back at her apartment, she wished she’d gone to the Diogenes Club rather than home – even if Mycroft had been babysitting her, she’d at least have some peace and quiet to read to.

The book was dry compared to Harry Potter, which she still believed to be the pinnacle of British writing. The language was outdated and it didn’t help that even half of the British slang in the modern age was foreign to Emili – she had asked for a bag of chips at the supermarket and was directed to an aisle in frozen goods with French fries. The formality was irritating – people had ever really talked like that? – and it seemed like it was going to take forever to read.

And it really _would,_ if the banging from the apartment below never stopped.

_“With a renewal of tenderness, however, they repaired to her room on leaving the dining-parlour,”_ Emili mouthed along with the books, having to speak the words herself to manage to stay focused rather than just let her mind wander. _“And sat with her till summoned to coffee. She was still very poorly, and Eliza-“_

Another thud coming from 221B made her muscles jump where she laid on her stomach on her bed, having slept late and decided to wake up by reading, only getting up long enough to brush her hair and teeth and wash her face. Gritting her teeth, Emili resumed reading after ten seconds of nothing from downstairs.

_“-And Elizabeth would not quit her at all, till late in the evening, when she had the comfort of seeing her asleep, and when it appeared to her rather right than pleasant that she should go down stairs herself. On entering the drawing-room she found the whole party at-“_

Something loud shattered and then something heavy fell, making her tense up again. It sounded like a piece of furniture had tipped, something had fallen off of it, and then it had fallen back onto its feet again.

_“-At loo, and was immediately invited to join them; but suspecting them to be playing high, she declined it, and making her sister the excuse, said she would-“_

Something slammed hard into a wall downstairs in Sherlock’s apartment. Emili was astonished that John was letting the ruckus continue for so long, and if the blogger wasn’t going to do something about it, then she would. It was getting ridiculous.

Emili pushed her bookmark in between the open pages and then slammed the novel shut, pushing it to the side of her pillow and hopping off of her bed. She looked down at her nightgown, which had the image of the TARDIS designed across the front, and pulled it down her thighs, freeing the material where it had gotten bunched up. At full length, the dress went about to her knees.

A dress and long pink hair didn’t make her look very scary, but at least she was taller than John, and that was a fact that Emili was very proud of most of the time – she may not be big enough to scare Sherlock, but she wasn’t the smallest.

As she stormed downstairs, the noise just continued. A muffled yell came while she was huffing on the stairwell angrily and she almost viciously thought _I hope you burned yourself_ and then immediately hoped that if Sherlock _had_ gotten hurt from an experiment, it wasn’t bad enough to need anything more than some cold water.

Emili didn’t knock on the door before she tried the handle, and it swung right on open when she pushed. The teenager put her hands on her hips and pushed the door shut with a kick, looking around for Sherlock and John irately.

“Excuse you, sir Neanderthals,” she hissed, knowing that it was a weak insult most of the time but one that this man in particular would take offense to. “ _Some_ of us are actually trying to maintain our GPAs up here, and it’s really hard to do that when – _oh my God!”_

She cut herself off and covered her mouth with her hands, eyes flying wide with shock. Sherlock came leaping out of the kitchen, hurrying backwards and looking over his shoulder to avoid tripping, while someone else followed, wielding a long sword with a slightly-curved blade. The attacker turned to look at her, pausing his assault on Sherlock. Emili was only in her nightgown and fluffy socks with her hair tied casually back. Whoever was giving sword-fighting lessons was decked out like a ninja, wearing a long black robe that covered all of him but his face, which was wrapped with scarves. The thinnest, most see-through scarf was deep red and went over his eyes, allowing him to see.

Emili regretted drawing the attention to herself with her shouting before figuring out what the commotion was from. The robed man took his eyes off of Sherlock and changed course, coming towards her. Part of Em thought that it was because he didn’t want witnesses to his intended murder, but another was already looking around for something to combat a sword with. There was a table against the wall with a lamp and a steel candelabra. Emili picked up the candelabra and held it up to the ninja or whatever he was supposed to be.

When the sword came down at her, she held up the candelabra in front of it and the blade was stopped by the curve between two of the candle rests. Throwing her arm to the side, Emili jerked the candelabra, and the sword, to her left. With the blade not poised to strike, she turned to her left and raised her right leg, delivering a strong kick into the man’s chest. She was thankful for the self-defense videos on the internet – she was surprised she got her leg up that far and wished she hadn’t just flashed a nice shot, but the sword flailed out of the candelabra and its bearer went stumbling backwards, bent over with a hand against his sternum.

Emili looked over at Sherlock to demand what was going on. The detective was straightening his jacket and fixing the cuffs on the sleeves. Her jaw dropped incredulously. Weren’t there more important things to do than fix his clothes?!

The attacker recovered swiftly from the kick and went for the first person he saw upon standing up. Even with two against one, Emili thought that the sword definitely made the fight more than fair. This time, the man (he didn’t have breasts or Emili would’ve noticed when she kicked him) held the hilt of the sword in one hand and the flat edge of the blade in the other and went after Sherlock again. She watched helplessly as the attacker forced Sherlock into the kitchen with the sword held ahead of him.

Emili picked her way over the pieces of a shattered vase on the carpet to get far enough into the living room – er, parlor – to see the adjoined kitchen. Sherlock was forced down onto his back over the table, arms up and working on shoving the sword away from his throat. The man definitely trying to kill him was bent over him between the detective’s legs, trying very valiantly to be stronger than Sherlock and cut his throat.

Unable to believe that this was actually a real situation, Emili charged the kitchen and leapt from a couple feet away onto the man’s back. He made no move to catch her, but she wrapped her arms tightly around his throat and her legs around his waist. It took some awkward wiggling to secure a position on his back, but then she put her chin on his shoulder and reached after his arms, grabbing at his wrists and pulling the sword away from Sherlock.

With more force pulling the sword away, Sherlock pushed harder with one hand than the other and let the end of the blade go down while the other kept going back towards its wielder. The tip of the sword pushed into the table and dug into the wood, and without such an imminent threat so close to his neck, Sherlock started to kick, repeatedly jabbing his knees into the man’s legs. Emili let go of the wrist trying to get the sword out of the gauge in the table and got that arm around the man’s throat, tightening her grip in a stranglehold.

Finally, with not just his assassination thwarted but his life threatened, the man let Sherlock free and stood away, dropping the sword. Both of his hands went to Emili’s arm, and painfully strong fingers gripped her arm like claws, trying to forcibly loosen her grip. The teen held on and even leaned back, using her weight to her advantage. The intruder stumbled with the added weight and backed into a wall.

Emili wheezed. That was a lot more hurtful than it had looked in _The Princess Bride._

Coughing over the man’s shoulder, her arm loosened from his neck and her thighs relaxed. The man ripped her arm off of his throat and elbowed her violently in her side, bending backwards further. Emili lost her grip and crashed down to the floor, leaning on the wall and nursing a sore back and what felt like a broken kidney.

“Look!” Sherlock shouted, getting the man’s attention back to him. He pointed with his left hand to the mirror over a dressing table that had found a home in 221B’s parlor.

For just a second, the assassin held himself straighter, seeing the movements of Sherlock and himself. It wasn’t long at all, but it was long enough for the detective to step forward and swing his fist forcefully into the attacker’s jaw. The man reeled before he dropped a few feet away from his forgotten sword, and Emili curiously stared at the body, wondering absently how long he was going to stay unconscious.

Sherlock, again, fixed his black blazer and his collar, brushing off the imaginary dust on the sleeves like a perfectionist. He looked down at the prone body, huffed indignantly at the rudeness of being assaulted, and then looked to Emili, who remained seated by the wall, the confusion catching up with her now that no one’s life was in peril.

“Friend of yours?” She asked, holding her left hand over her right side where she’d been hit.

“Assassin, more like, from a Hindi museum jewelry heist.” Sherlock lowered himself into a kneel in front of her and took her chin in hand, turning her head to one side and then peering into her eyes. “Are you injured?” Suddenly the face-grabbing made more sense – for all he knew, Emili could’ve hit her head on the wall, too.

“Just winded,” she replied. She was hurting, but there wasn’t much that even John could have done about that. It was pretty obvious at this point that John wasn’t home. If there was internal bleeding, then she could apologize for accidentally lying after the emergency surgery. “When did you take a new case?”

Sherlock pursed his lips in vague annoyance. She had about half a second to wonder what she had said to tick him off. “I believe it was when I tried to wake you up and you replied with some profane language about it being too early,” he stiffly responded.

She didn’t even remember being woken up this time. She must have been _really_ tired the night before. Although Sherlock looked very unhappy with her, Emili started to giggle… which just made him scowl at her.

Emili had always been a bit impish. She liked to pull obvious pranks with her sister and more complex ones on the little girl. She drove her parents half-nuts with her antics, ranging from pretending she had no idea what they were talking about on one occasion and on another laughing for no reason just to alarm them and watch them panic, wondering what she’d done _this_ time. Nothing was ever harmful, just… silly.

Her mischievous sense of humor had dulled significantly after her family’s deaths. She loved their reactions and their input on her jokes. Without her audience, who was there to perform for? Her crowd, her mom and dad, gone – her assistant, her baby sister, there one second and gone the next, like smoke. Then she moved to England, and she went from being the poor kid who didn’t really talk to being the weird American.

Emili healed in her own time. There was still a lot further to go, but the Holmes parents had been nothing but kind, and once, she had dared to resort to an old classic – mixing Skittles and M&Ms together in a bowl and leaving it innocently out on the counter. She had gotten both of the married couple, and thankfully, they’d found it funny, too.

Mycroft wasn’t the type to appreciate jokes, so Emili wasn’t really up for it at first. He was too austere, and she wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t throw her out if she annoyed him. She got more comfortable the longer she stayed. Mycroft lacked genuine patience, but had perfected the art of pretending he had inexhaustible reserves, and though he claimed not to care what insipid activities she got up to elsewhere, Emili wasn’t an idiot, and she noticed when she was being followed by Anthea or some other falsely-named employee of Mr. British Government. He wanted her safe, even if it was for the sake of his parents.

Sherlock wasn’t his brother. Though he was the dynamic opposite of Mycroft, he still turned his nose up at what he perceived as juvenile antics. Maybe they were childish, but Emili took her amusement where she could. Her family had died all at once and then her life had been entirely uprooted. Since she’d come to England, she’d had to deal with learning to operate as the ward of someone who a _lot_ of people in various foreign agencies probably wouldn’t mind to see assassinated, moved into her own apartment, and had been victim to her own attempted murder. She’d seen someone die. She’d been in various crime scenes and had become such a common feature at New Scotland Yard that a fair few of the detectives now greeted her by name. Em figured that she deserved whatever laughs and stress relief she could get, so long as no one was hurt.

But in the process of not hurting anyone, she didn’t want to make trouble for herself with the brother that actually seemed somewhat inclined to act like her sibling, even if he had only become so after she’d proven that she had the guts and the skills to be a partner in semi-crime and crime-solving. Mrs. Hudson was out of the question in most cases, because she was very easy to startle and Emili hated to bother her when she was always so generous. John, however…

John was an easy target. She didn’t worry about scaring him, because he had a ship-shape health bill and the nerves of an army captain. He was certainly an adult, but unlike the Holmes duo, John was an adult that saw the value in enjoying one’s self sometimes, and he chuckled along with Emili at the slapstick humor she liked to play on her TV for background noise.

So of course, Emili had been the first to address cleaning up the evidence of the fight with the would-be assassin. Sherlock dragged the body out of 221B and presumably off to Scotland Yard, but Em didn’t ask and he didn’t tell. If he had a funny story to tell, then what was funny to her would likely be annoying to him, and he seemed no more peevish than he’d been before he’d left. She swept up the ceramic from the smashed vase. Sherlock disposed of the sword. Emili replaced the things on the table that had fallen when Sherlock had been pinned, and Emili had taken a long look at the wall where the sword had made a deep slash, winced, and then decided to shift the stick-on tabs just a _little_ bit to the side so that the detective’s long Belstaff coat would cover the imperfection when the veteran came home.

She wasn’t sure what she was more eager to see – John struggling to figure out why the apartment seemed off, or John oblivious to anything having happened while he was out.

Sherlock was reading a thick, tightly-bound tome in his reclining armchair when John returned, the footfalls up the stairs pausing as a key was inserted into the lock. Emili reclined further back into the couch, her own book over her chest while she read and struggled to focus on the formal language. Sherlock hated being bored and needed something to occupy his brain, but Emili was far more selective in being bored – she could have something to do, but if it was something she didn’t _want_ to do, she was far more likely to be bored.

“Hi, John,” Emily welcomed calmly, masking up the excited butterflies that bubbled up in her chest, almost making her break out into a suspiciously keen grin. She held her bored façade up while she read a long line that went almost an entire paragraph.

John looked around the apartment. Emili kept watching in her peripheral vision, pretending she didn’t notice him hesitating. He stood right at the doorway, the door still swung wide open, and he squinted around. He looked at the hanging coats particularly hard before he shook his head.

“Morning, Em,” he called back, sounding completely worn out and two hundred percent done with the day, even though it was barely noon.

“You took your time,” Sherlock drawled from the armchair, not parting his eyes from the novel in his hands. Steam rose from a teacup to the right of his chair.

“Yeah,” John agreed, and blew out a long, deep breath through his nose. “… I didn’t get the shopping,” he copped, pursing his lips and looking down.

“What?” Sherlock looked up and stared at John sternly. Emili thought she was going to giggle uncontrollably if _Sherlock,_ of all people, gave John a talk about how important groceries were. Sherlock, who, half of the time, had to be bullied into eating by irritated doctors and exasperated sisters. “Why not?” He demanded, affronted, putting his book down on his lap, the pages facing down onto his legs.

That was all it took for John’s agitation to come up to the surface. He held out his arms and sarcastically retorted, “Because I had a _row,_ in the _shop,_ with a chip-and-PIN machine!”

Emili took a moment before she figured that he’d been struggling with a self-checkout. She _hated_ those some days, but others, they seemed like the best human invention yet. Not enjoying the absentminded chatter that went on between cashier and customer, Emili liked to pay herself, but the machines could be worthy of Satan himself at times. Sometimes they insisted that there was an unauthorized item on the scale when it was really just the popsicles she’d just scanned. Other times, they stubbornly declared that she had to wait for a sales associate, which just negated the entire point of fighting with a machine instead of a human.

“You… fought… with a machine…?” Sure, Emili had had her… _differences…_ with the things in the past, but she’d never just left her groceries there because she’d had a fight with them. She canted her head at John and gladly took the distraction from _Pride and Prejudice_ , closing it up and tossing it to the other side of the couch, where it bounced on the cushion. “How, exactly, did this work?” She started smirking at him, unable to help herself. Had the blogger pulled rank on the machine or something?

Now more embarrassed than irate, John cleared his throat and looked down at his shoes. “It… sat there, and I shouted abuse,” he admitted.

That seemed much more characteristic of the usually level-headed army captain when he had had too much. Emili giggled. He must’ve looked _really_ dumb, yelling at a self-checkout stand in the middle of a busy supermarket. She wished she’d gone just so that she could have watched. John rolled his eyes when he understood where her sympathies had lain, but though he objected to the side she took, he had no problem with her lounging around in his apartment.

“Have you got cash?” He asked Sherlock, looking straight at the detective as he asked, a pinkish blush rising to his face.

Sherlock shook his head slightly in disbelief and he tilted his head momentarily towards the kitchen table. “Take my card,” he invited carelessly, picking up the book he’d put down. Evidently he’d decided that whatever it was promised far more interesting sentences to peruse than John had.

John turned his back to the two of them and started to go towards the kitchen, but suddenly he turned on his heel, raising a finger and pointing at Sherlock in a manner reminiscent of a mother who was doing all the chores. Emili, for her faults, had always been a fairly responsible child, but she was very used to seeing the expression on John’s face when her mother had scolded her sister.

“You could always go yourself, you know,” he suggested, tone suggesting that it wasn’t as much of an offer as it was a miffed realization that he was pulling all of the domestic weight. “You’ve been sitting there all morning!” Sherlock didn’t even go to the trouble of feigning guilt, staring at his book. Emili had no doubt he was both reading and listening. “You’ve not even moved since I’ve left…”

_Right. Not moved, at all,_ Emili agreed in her head. She waited for the almost four unbearable seconds before John recognized that he wasn’t going to be taken seriously and turned to stalk over to the table, then raised her fist to her mouth and bit down over her thumb to stifle her laughs. _There were no life-or-death fights in here._

“And what happened about that case you were offered?” John demanded, oblivious. “The Jaria diamond?”

With the familiar rustling of a crisp page, Sherlock turned to the next part of the book. “Not interested,” he lied. “I… sent them a message.”

Emili looked over to see her brother. Sherlock sensed her looking at him and smirked at her over the top of his book before his face went blank again and he continued acting innocent.

John, meanwhile, picked up the black billfold that Sherlock tended to carry from the table next to the detective’s microscope. He unfolded the three folds in the leather and thumbed through the contents until he found the debit card, slid it out of the card slot, and closed up the wallet, putting it back down. As he replaced it right where he found it, he happened to notice the damage to the table from the sword.

Em bit down on her lower lip, gentler than she had sunk her teeth into her fist. John looked over the entire table, zeroed in on that spot again, and rubbed his fingers over the shallow dig like he thought it was just a result of water or dust making a lighting trick. When it didn’t change or go away, he scowled at it and puffed.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's sudden interest in finances distracts Emili from emotional difficulties.

John went out again for the shopping and when he got back, Emili and Sherlock _had_ , in fact, given up the pretense of being so lazy they couldn’t bring themselves to move. Emili had returned to her own apartment upstairs and quickly showered, put on some daytime clothes more suitable for kicking intruders, and laced up some black combat boots. She left her book downstairs, intending to get some school done in the company of Sherlock. While he wasn’t exactly a tutor, he was the least likely to bother her, preferring quiet himself.

Sherlock chose to leave both of the doors into 221B open – both the one that opened into the kitchen from the side of the hall, and the one that Emili had come storming through earlier in the morning that opened into the living room from across the stairwell. He leaned forwards in his armchair, a red-covered laptop out on the coffee table that he had dragged over. The six-foot-tall man had to look down and slouch his back to see the computer screen on such a low surface, but he appeared relatively comfortable.

_“Mrs. Bennet was, in fact, too much overpowered to say a great deal while Sir William remained; but no sooner had he left them than her feelings found a rapid vent.”_ Emili paused in her silent mouthing of the words to translate that to modern language in her head – Mrs. Bennet talked badly about Sir William behind his back. _“In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving the whole matter; secondly, she was very sure that Mr. Collins had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be happy together; and fourthly, that the match might be broken off.”_ On the ground floor, the front door opened, letting in the sounds from the street – a honking taxi and the people walking along outside. It shut again and the noise became muffled. _“Two inferences, however, were plainly deduced from the whole; one, that Elizabeth was the real cause of all the mischief; and the other, that she herself had been barbarously used-“_

“Don’t worry about me,” John’s voice called up, remarkably managing to sound strained and casual at the same time. Emili perked up, hearing his voice, and she shut her mouth, looking over her book to the doors. The doctor’s blond head popped up on the stairwell. He advanced sluggishly, weighed down by plastic bags of groceries loaded in his hands and dangling from his arms. “I can manage!”

The teenager tossed her book haphazardly to the side, wishing she’d chosen something more contemporary (not to belittle Austen, but the novelist’s works weren’t her speed) and more than willing to help John if it gave her a viable excuse to procrastinate.

“You’re back!” Em leapt up excitedly. At the sudden sound of her happy call, Sherlock frowned, his eyebrows drawing together. He stared intently at the computer screen, reading something with such intense focus that he didn’t blink, his sharp chin rested on top of interlocked fingers, elbows balanced on his knees. “Did you get the-“

Before Emili could even finish asking about the particular items, John grunted. “Yes, I got your entire shopping list, and your change is in one of these bags here.” Emili met him on one of the top steps and the two fumbled to trade bags to each other’s hands. For ease, Emili took the ones that he was holding up to his chest while John kept the ones with the handles around his forearms. “Somewhere…” There were over a dozen bags, but most of them weren’t packed full.

Emili had seen grocery excursions with twice this many objects in bags, and that was to feed four people. For only one less, this seemed almost unrealistic – but her dad had actually enjoyed cooking and her sister had _loved_ to help, which meant, for a long time, many unnecessary messes and wasted ingredients. What could be expected from someone so small they had to sit on the counter to reach? Emili herself wasn’t big on cooking, just knew the essentials and her favorites. She was trying to keep a somewhat reasonable diet, but gone were the days when she stuffed herself with flavored and stuffed chicken, potatoes, and forced herself to swallow steamed vegetables. It wasn’t like Sherlock was going to care, and if John would, then he had yet to notice the suspicious lack of veggies on the lists.

Usually Emili and John took turns doing the grocery runs. Having mostly free reign in each other’s apartments, they had both arranged to keep written lists on their refrigerators, held up with magnets, and unless Sherlock decided he needed the space or the magnets, his and John’s usually stayed there. When one of them went, they checked the other’s list.

The groceries Emili was carrying were a mix of hers and John’s. The cold carton of chocolate milk was hers, but she sure as hell hadn’t asked for the Earl Grey tea bags, both of which were in the same sack. She carried them to the table, thankful that it wasn’t completely covered with clutter, and set the things in her arms down. Following behind her, John laid his armfuls of food down, too, and he sighed with relief as the pressure was taken off of his arms.

Sherlock didn’t acknowledge their struggles, nor did he object to their polite conversation while they separated each other’s things by apartment. John knew what was his and Emili knew what _wasn’t_ hers, so they took those things and sorted them out into 221B’s kitchen, which was sadly lacking in brightness. Though Emili liked to have her apartment light and colorful, Sherlock didn’t care for livening up the living arrangements, and John had an eye for calmer colors, as was evidenced by his array of gently-toned, dull-colored sweaters. John had managed to force Sherlock into forfeiting certain spaces in the kitchen for actual foodstuffs rather than just experiments – for example, the cabinets on one side of the stove were for _actual_ food, and half of the cabinets on the other side were for dishes, and Sherlock could have the other half for whatever he wanted, as long as it was kept away from contaminating their dishware.

Emili found herself storing several more boxes of tea than two men could possibly need while John looked at the big box of red-packaged ramen as if he was just now noticing the things he’d picked up for her. He turned it over to look at the ingredients, made an unhappy face, and put it down inside one of the emptied plastic bags, following it up with a bag of chips with a disgruntled expression. So maybe he _had_ noticed her habits.

“Would you like help getting these upstairs?” John volunteered helpfully while Emili started to gather the lighter bags and push the bags’ handles over her arms like John had done, saving the heavier ones, those that contained milk, eggs, and cheese, for last to carry with her hands.

“No, thanks,” Emili declined respectfully. There were really only five bags’ worth of things, which John had stretched into six by putting a pack of chewing gum, a bottle of honey, and a pack of hot dogs all into one of their own. “It’s just a few bags.” In America, she had carried as many bags at once as she possibly could, even at risk of hurting her fingers trying to support that much weight. It was a competition between her and her sister that Em won almost invariably, thanks to her status as the teenager compared to her sibling’s mere nine years.

Just thinking about her sister’s small-numbered age sobered Emili from her mood and she looked down, taking all of the bags in her hands and wrestling them up to her apartment. Her sister had died so young. Like at least half of the girls Emili had known, her sister had wanted to be a veterinarian (but only after she realized she couldn’t be an elf for Santa). Her sister was one of the unlucky few that would never get to pursue that dream, or even get to grow out of it and expand her interests.

Emili had wanted to become a lawyer. She had watched TV shows with her parents once Disney got to be too… well, at the risk of sounding like the Holmes brothers, too _insipid._ The plots seemed the same – misbehaving sibling, over-exaggerated relationship drama, girl meets boy and pines for him for three years, horribly cliché things happen or things that are so unrealistic it almost hurts. Emili had liked realism. She had liked lawyers. On the television screen, they always seemed so confident, so fast with their replies, and so sure of themselves.

Lawyers didn’t seem to battle with their self-esteem. Lawyers didn’t go clothes shopping with their mom and hate trying on clothes because they even hated the ones that fit, thinking it dropped too low on their chest or was too tight on her hips or stomach. They didn’t check out their rear in the mirrors because they had had their ass smacked once as part of a bullying gag from a school soccer player. Lawyers didn’t falter in a courtroom and it seemed silly to think that they would be anything different outside of one.

By the time Emili had outgrown the fantasy that becoming a lawyer would make her like an impervious TV character, she had already learned more about the career of her choice and had taken a liking to it, even browsing some colleges’ pre-law programs, curious of the scholarships she could hope to work towards.

When her family was taken away from her, being a lawyer suddenly seemed like it wasn’t enough and never would be.

There were two lawyers she met recurrently. One was the family lawyer, whom she had actually met twice before and who was friendly as he read to her her parents’ will and told her that everything that had been left to her and her sister would now come to her, and she would get not only hers, but also her sister’s inheritance when she turned eighteen. The other had been cooler, less invested in talking to a sixteen-year-old, and had only seen to it that the guilty party got time in prison.

Neither of them satisfied her. One was about as helpful as a slap to the face, and the other didn’t have the motivation to even be that. Not a single lawyer who ever saw her family’s case would have had the power to save their lives. Emili didn’t know what she wanted to do anymore, but being a lawyer wasn’t it. It felt like too little, too late.

She was storing her groceries on autopilot when it finally occurred to her that maybe the reason she liked going with Sherlock was because it wasn’t dealing with the aftermath of a tragedy – it was getting justice for the victims, but it was also stopping the people responsible before anyone else was hurt. The Bailyre couple’s lives had been saved on a more recent case that came to Sherlock’s attention. They didn’t have children, but no one would have to notify their trembling next-of-kin that their belongings would be passed to them.

Thoughtlessly, Emili closed the refrigerator after she had the contents organized to her liking, and she raised a hand up over her chest. The silver chain around her neck felt cool to the touch, though her throat had long since grown used to the temperature.

“I miss you,” she whispered to the empty air of the apartment. The teenager vividly remembered joking with her family about how she couldn’t wait to move out so she wouldn’t have to pick her way over her sister’s toys. She remembered the first time Liza had understood what that meant, and had ended up crying for almost forty minutes with learning that one day Emili wouldn’t live with her anymore. She recalled, with a tear streaking down her face from wet eyes, Liza giggling and playing with their mom, who crawled on the floor after the giggling four-year-old, snapping her teeth and making growling noises playfully.

Emili knew it had been in her head, but for a moment she thought she could have seen her family standing in her new apartment. Her sister, bouncing on the couch; her mother straightening the family portrait over the mantel, and her father wrapping his arms around his wife and kissing her cheek. Then, before her eyes, the figures of people she’d loved faded away as fast as they had been taken.

She called Sherlock and Mycroft her brothers, but they weren’t her family – at least, not in the way that Liza had been her sister, and she knew and accepted that they didn’t care about her like she’d loved Liza. It would’ve been weird if they did, having known her for such a short time in comparison, and they were vastly different from most everyone else anyway. Emili called them her family because she needed a family. She was a sixteen-year-old living on her own in a new land with excess money, too much free time, and not enough guidance. Calling Mycroft her brother made her feel like she had the guidance if she needed it and just pretended that she was too stubborn to ask, not that it wasn’t being given.

Taking in a shaking breath, Emili wiped her face with her hand and rubbed away the tear that slipped down to her chin. Thankfully there wasn’t makeup on her face to smear when she ripped off a paper towel from the roll by the sink and pressed it to her eyes, soaking up the tears before they fell. She considered going into her bathroom and putting on some cosmetics to try to cover up that she’d been crying, but while it might have worked on John, she wasn’t sure how effective it would be on Sherlock; John had the tact not to press once it was established that yes, she was okay, but she didn’t want to talk about it, anyway, so there was no point in making it into a big deal, or convincing Sherlock that it was a big enough problem worth hiding.

Em took another look at her apartment. Her dad would’ve liked the place but her mom would have wanted a yard, because she had always said that when they got a new house, she would be getting a dog.

Swallowing, the sixteen-year-old pulled her arms close to her body in a self-comforting hug and turned off the lights, pulling the door shut and locking it behind her. She went back down to 221B, hoping that Sherlock and John would distract her. If they didn’t, she always had _Pride and Prejudice._

The boys had left the doors open still. “Is that my computer?” John asked Sherlock, agitation increasing from nil to fifty.

“Of course,” Sherlock calmly said like it was obvious, and that didn’t help.

“What?!”

“Mine was in the bedroom.” Again, said like it was obvious. Emili hesitated before stepping in, but rolled her eyes at herself. They were adults. And if John got homicidal from his nerves being ground into the floor, then he had a gun, and he was a damn good marksman, so it was still decently safe for Em.

“And you couldn’t be bothered to get up?!” _Really,_ Emili thought with a sort of fondness for the veteran. She had to learn to appreciate the quirks of having them as neighbors, or she’d have knocked their heads together like the three stooges before the first three days was up. “It’s _password-protected!”_

Sherlock winced. “In a manner of speaking,” he delicately replied, unfolding his hands under his chin and bringing elegant fingers to the keyboard. Without missing a beat in his response to John, he started typing something most likely unrelated. “Took me less than a minute to guess yours. Not exactly Fort Knox.”

Emili scowled. That was a little alarming. Her phone was locked by fingerprint, so she wasn’t too concerned that Sherlock could break into that. She knew there were methods, but surely he wouldn’t be so fascinated with a teenager’s cell phone that he would go to those extents. Her laptop was another story. She didn’t have anything on there that was incriminating or embarrassing in nature, but it _did_ have a journal that she had reluctantly started to write, and it was very personal to her.

Like John, it had been suggested to her after her trauma that she vent by writing. John chose to publish his online because it focused on the day-to-day occurrences that distracted him. Emili kept hers private because it was where she released pent-up feelings – seething fury at her parents’ loss, overwhelming grief for her sister, tired resignation as she was moved to another continent, irritated declarations of the first impressions Mycroft had made which she wasn’t exactly _proud_ of putting down on a record, but couldn’t bring herself to delete. Rereading her thoughts and comparing her feelings then to the current days helped put in perspective how much less time she spent in mourning and the gradual lift from what came close to, if not qualified as, depression.

“You should see if there’s an option of security questions instead of a password,” Em recommended to John, having the same thought make a home in her own mind. Sherlock might guess passwords, but security questions? If they were about histories, then he or Mycroft could dig them up easily enough, but preferences and memories would be much harder to hack through.

John stomped over to the detective and put his hand on the back of the screen. Sherlock pulled his hands back in the nick of time to keep John from crushing his fingers when he closed the screen of the computer. John glowered heatedly and picked it up protectively under his arm, carrying it safely to the other recliner that the doctor had claimed as his own. Sherlock glared at his back for a few seconds before the gaze lessened in ferocity and he started to steeple his hands over his mouth again, his default thinking position.

Emili sat back down on the couch again and picked up her Jane Austen book. She opened it back up to the page with her bookmark. She looked at the black words on the white page and tried to convince herself that she needed to get at least through chapter thirty today in order to give herself a reasonable time frame to write her paper on it without staying up late and cramming.

Try as she might, Ms. Bennet’s nosy intrusion on other peoples’ lives just wasn’t as appealing as the darkened room where she could retreat to temporary solitude.

John sat down and carefully stood the laptop up on its side, leaning it against the side of the chair. Emili watched it, unsure that it would stay standing if John put up the footrest and shifted the position of the chair. He didn’t; he picked up a small stack of papers from the side table, most of them wide like mail envelopes, and grimaced at them.

Although Emili was criticizing Ms. Bennet for being nosy, she was doing the same thing, surreptitiously looking up from _Pride and Prejudice_ to watch John look through his mail, looking steadily more discontented as he went from item to item. He landed on an envelope colored red for urgency and his forehead creased.

“Oh…” he sighed quietly. “I need to get a job.”

“Oh, dull,” Sherlock clucked dismissively.

After an obvious internal struggle with either moral hang-ups or his pride, John fidgeted forward on his seat, wringing his hands together in front of him awkwardly. He leaned forward so that most of the pressure of his weight was on his feet instead of the chair.

“Listen, um…” the man started to say to Sherlock, looking altogether very uncomfortable and even a little bit pained. “If you’d be able to lend me some…”

He trailed off, cringing at himself. Emili smiled sympathetically and put two and two together – a red letter and a comment about needing a job? She was no stranger to people receiving bills and then making grousing remarks about their income, even if those bills were just email copies of receipts from online orders.

“You can get some from me if you want,” the girl offered kindly, not outright saying what it was she was offering. If John couldn’t say it himself, then she doubted it would help to hear it bluntly stated by someone else.

John shook his head, not even giving himself time to consider the proffered help. “No, I’m not taking money for bills from a sixteen-year-old.” Emili shrugged. She wasn’t going to argue him on his finances, although she didn’t really get what the problem was. People were funny about their money sometimes. Then, she supposed she’d have felt uneasy taking money from her baby sister for something that she should have been able to afford on her own – like an iTunes card or Hot Topic shirt – and wondered if John felt the same way about taking money from her as she did from Liza. “Em, don’t you have a part-timer?”

Given how often she left the apartment when it wasn’t with either of the two, Emili could see how it was a reasonable question, especially since she never seemed to complain about money or allowances, which she guessed most kids would be doing. “No.” She stated honestly, shrugging. “When I’m not with you two or working on school, I’m just… out.”

London was a big city with lots of places to explore. It would be a lie if she wasn’t out in the vague hope that she might meet someone famous, like Emma Watson, or end up walking by the cast of _Doctor Who_ filming a scene for the upcoming season. It happened to other people, why not her? And though it was very unlikely, at least she still got to immerse herself in the culture, desensitize herself to the accents, and learn to better adapt to the differences in terminology.

“The family’s pretty well-off,” Em explained to John, not knowing if Sherlock had already or not. Emili wasn’t privy to the full story, but she did know that Sherlock actually did need someone to split the rent with; despite the overall wealth of the Holmeses, Sherlock had been cut off at one point or another. Although she knew better than to ask, she suspected that it was because his family didn’t want to risk a higher income facilitating a regression back into drugs. “Mycroft sees to my rent, since technically an adult needed to sign the contract anyway, and I get pocket money every week.”

John looked marginally surprised, but then chagrined, like he believed he should have expected as much. “That’s generous.”

It was a very generous allocation of money, indeed. Pounds and euros didn’t go as far as dollars in the general world economy, but they still stretched pretty well – especially when Mycroft didn’t seem to realize that Emili didn’t want most of what she was getting. What was she going to do with it, exactly? Save up for a vacation to Italy?

Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. Having the government as a brother probably opened doors to travel, right?...

“It’s to occupy myself so that I don’t bother him,” she disillusioned John quickly, lest he get the wrong idea.

John cracked a small grin. “Slightly less generous.”

Sherlock cleared his throat to get attention, and a small part of Emili was irritated that he got it just by making noise. Most people politely said the others’ names, but not Sherlock.

“I need to go to the bank,” he announced loudly, hopping up from the chair with the sudden energy of a rabbit and springing for his dark coat and long blue scarf. Emili still didn’t get why he wore them everywhere – she could comfortably go out in just one layer (two, if undergarments counted) but Sherlock never seemed uncomfortable in the extra clothes.

Emili looked after him curiously while he pulled his coat on. Sherlock was tall and slender; very lean, built like a track member or a swimmer, not a football or basketball player. With the jacket, he looked a little taller, even – almost twice his size, which added to his presence around strangers, she supposed, and the people who didn’t know upon seeing him to shut their mouths because he would probably deduce them right into a semi-permanent blush and some stuttered consonants.

Of course, it also made his silhouette look like the dark shadow figure that the kids were warned about with the Stranger Danger program in America, but, ah… Sherlock didn’t seem to care about that part.

The teen turned her entire body to John, rotating on the couch and rocking her knees to the side. “That’s convenient, given the topic.” Leaning down, she tugged at her shoelaces to make sure they were tight enough to hurry and keep up with an energetic Sherlock Holmes.

“Do you think it was coincidence?” John questioned lightly, significantly more relaxed now that he’d ripped his computer away from its kidnapper and been forced to mellow out by the bills.

Her shoulders fell. If she knew how to read Sherlock, she’d know how to read Mycroft, and her life would have gotten at least thirty-two percent easier. “It’s hard to tell with him,” she sighed, and John nodded, echoing her frustration in companionate commiseration.

Sherlock led Emili and John into a taxi and gave the driver the address of Tower 42, Old Broad Street, and nothing else. The location meant almost nothing to Emili, but it seemed crystal-clear to the driver, who put the car into gear and started driving. It wasn’t a very long ride, but Emili, for once, had a window seat, and she all but pressed her face to the glass trying to look outside.

She still thought that their driving was weird, since she had a minor heart attack every time they broke what would have been an American driving law, but neither Sherlock nor John seemed at all alarmed when these things happened. Em was going to have to get used to it sooner rather than later if she intended to stay in England, even after she turned eighteen.

Tower 42 turned out to be a building – a very distinct one, at that. On Old Broad Street, there were a lot of big buildings and heavy foot traffic, but Tower 42 made all of the other structures look like toys – except for one, an absolutely incredible feat of architecture – an almost-cylindrical, bullet-shaped building covered in windows of glass that gleamed all hues of blues, greys, and dark blacks and greens in the sunlight that bounced off of the sides of the building and threatened to blind her with the glare. The top rounded off and came to a tipped point in a dome-like cover of darker windows, or maybe it was just the angle. Emili stared off at that building with wide eyes, captivated. It looked like something unreal, like something she would see in a picture but never in real life, like the golden city of Tel Aviv.

Sherlock walked ahead of his moderately-confused blogger and astonished sister. John noticed Emili’s reaction to the building visible from entire streets away, dwarfing its surroundings almost as well as Tower 42. The doctor chuckled.

“The Gherkin,” he told her, snapping her out of her awed reverie. Emili turned to him, unsure what he’d said, and he pointed over her shoulder at the building again. “The Gherkin. 30 Street Mary Axe. We can go there sometime if you like.”

Emili didn’t even care that it was John offering to take her instead of one of the men who were actually somewhat obligated to be including her and introducing her to the country. She just nodded dumbly, excited at the prospect of seeing that up close and observing what it looked like from the inside. It had to be incredible.

Coming up too close to Tower 42 brought the teenager’s attention back to the matter at hand – whatever it was. It was a _huge_ skyscraper, even taller than the Gherkin, and stretched up so high that even when she tipped her head back to see it, she was pretty sure she wasn’t looking at the top. It was also covered in glass panels, but these were darker. Less impressive. The size was admirable, but the style was very plain rectangular-shaped windows, and the colors were uniform, not varying and planned like the triangle- and diamond-shaped patterns of the Gherkin.

Stepping inside made it seem like an entirely different world, but John didn’t hesitate to follow after Sherlock, and Emili wasn’t so reverent of the surroundings that she was afraid to go inside. It was just a building. Crossing the threshold made it seem like much more. Extravagant, gorgeous, _huge._ In a way it reminded her of looking up the center of the Marriott Marquis when she’d gone to a convention one year with her mom, but this was so much more impressive. She couldn’t imagine how much it had cost to build the place. The interior was stunning. Marble and linoleum and reflective metals from the escalators all caught her eyes at once.

“Yes, when you said we were going to the bank…” John drawled sarcastically. This was not what he’d had in mind when Sherlock had announced their destination in the apartment.

Sherlock stepped onto an ascending escalator. John got onto the next step, and Emili mindlessly followed, only to grab the rail and stumble forwards when half of her footing rose while the other stayed behind, having stepped on two stairs at once.

Now with a higher vantage point, Emili could see more of how the interior functioned. It was offices, receptions, lobbies, bars, the fronts of mood-lit restaurants. Clearly being rented to many corporations and business at once, everything mashed together into a clutter that somehow seemed modernized and complimentary.

“In America, when I went to a bank, I went to a one-story building no bigger than a post office.” _What was next?_ Emili thought. She truly was in another country. Was she going to find that post offices come in the forms of castles now? “Are all the banks here practically the Marriott, but better?”

No one answered her, but when she looked to her left to see if John had even heard her (because he was less likely to ignore her), she saw that he was smiling down at his shoes. She was sardonically glad to be of amusement, but internally pleased that at least someone outwardly enjoyed having her around.

The escalator took them up to a big station with a long marble reception desk with rope stands cordoning off lines that weren’t very full at this time of day, and the people in the queue moved quickly as the secretaries did their jobs efficiently. Emili turned around after getting off of the escalator to put her hands on the silver banister and look down. Many, many stories lower, she could see the tops of people going about their lives and errands on the ground floor. Realistically she knew she wasn’t as high as she felt, but it seemed like she was already up higher than a building could reach. When she craned her neck back to seek out the ceiling, it was only barely closer to her than the first floor.

She giggled. This was the part of travel she liked. This was the part of going to England she had been looking forward to and hadn’t really gotten to indulge in, getting too caught up in serial suicides and an incoming flow of schoolwork and pesky, eccentric, and sometimes downright jerks for brothers. Her new adopted parents had tried to get her interested in sightseeing, but at the time her psychological and emotional wounds had been much fresher, and she had to push herself to get excited to do much of anything.

Now she could laugh and laugh and take pictures with her phone before she looked around in search of Sherlock and John, saw the latter motioning her over while Sherlock waited impatiently at his side, hands in the pockets of his coat and sighing at her apparent childishness, and Emili didn’t feel even a little bit sorry.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's old college "friend" has a mystery that needs solving.

One of the secretaries from the reception on the high floor led the trio into the huge floor of a corporate business in Shad Sanderson bank. Emili had never heard of it before, but didn’t get the chance to ask John if it was a well-known name in the United Kingdoms. Desks were set up in lines and rows, neatly organized in aligned paths, with tables featuring statues and trinkets and a few clichéd potted plants to brighten up the space. Pillars were up throughout the room for some reason that ran from the floor to the ceiling. They could have been meant for decoration, but given how high the building was, Emili wouldn’t have been at all shocked if they were for structural purposes.

Along the outside of the huge office floor were private offices that belonged to individuals and had engraved nameplates on their respective doors. These offices were pressed to the outsides of the building and had wall-to-ceiling windows made entirely of the tinted glass. The secretary let them into the office with the nameplate Sebastian Wilkes on the front and left the door opened for the man to come back.

Emili looked around as Sherlock did the same. John stood with his hands behind his back and his spine straight, like he was still in the army. She supposed some habits might be hard to break; she couldn’t imagine holding that position for very long, but it demanded a sort of respect as well as affording the same to whomever John addressed, and the implication that he had served only added to that.

Out of the window, Emili could see other buildings, but not ones that were at the same height. All that she saw were the tops of smaller ones close by, and in the distance, skyscrapers that might have come close to the incredible height that Tower 42 could boast. She could even see part of the Gherkin.

The office belonged to a man. That was pretty evident, even without having read the masculine name on the door. There was no lasting aroma, however faint, of perfume, and no scented soaps or hand sanitizers in sight. There was nothing particularly colorful or feminine, and the office greatly lacked in personal touches when the generous size was considered, which had her leaning towards it being a man’s space. The plant in the back corner was a small yucca. Filing cabinets were grey and gleaming, labels stuck on the drawers with forcibly-rigid handwriting for legibility.

Emili wasn’t done looking around, and if it were okay then she would have looked in the drawers, but she had reservations about that sort of thing when in a place completely surrounded by other people with the owner expected to walk in at any second. That was a good policy to have in place, evidently, because seconds later, a man just as tall as Sherlock speed-walked through the door and tugged it closed for privacy one-handedly.

Sebastian, Emili presumed, was clad in a dark, professional, three-piece suit tailored to fit his body, had a black-banded watch with a literally sparkling silver face, and wore what looked like diamond cufflinks on his sleeves. Even his shoes looked like they belonged in a commercial, except for the dried mud caked on the soles. His brown eyes were bright and she supposed she could consider him cute if she were actually into people almost twenty years older than her at _least,_ because he was around Sherlock’s age, as well, and her brother was in his mid-thirties. Sebastian’s hair was dark and thick like Sherlock’s, but his was straight, combed, and styled back with product where Sherlock’s was allowed to do what it wanted, which was to curl and stay at a natural part. Emili had to stop herself from wrinkling her nose at the cologne she smelled on him, which wasn’t _bad,_ by any means, just a strong scent very suddenly introduced to her nose.

“Sherlock Holmes!”

“Sebastian.”

Sherlock’s voice was flat and bored but he let Sebastian shake his hand enthusiastically with both of his. Emili took a look at the disgruntled look on Sherlock’s face and almost immediately decided that she wasn’t going to like Sebastian any more than Sherlock, because surprisingly enough she generally agreed with Sherlock’s opinion on other people, but then reminded herself that Sherlock was a tactless and insensitive self-diagnosed sociopath, and maybe she should make those kinds of character judgments for herself.

“Howdy, buddy! How long’s it been?” Sebastian hadn’t let go of Sherlock’s hand yet and it had passed from overly-eager to uncomfortably forced about four seconds before he opened his mouth again. “Eight years, since I last clapped eyes on you?”

Sherlock made no effort to hide his dislike, and he rubbed his hand off on his slacks when Sebastian let go. If the man saw it, then he didn’t say anything, but rubbed his own hands together. “These are my friends,” Sherlock introduced. If Emili didn’t know better, then she’d have thought that he said the word ‘friends’ with subtle but present pride. “Emili and John.”

Sebastian looked at Emili first because she was closer to him. He looked her over quickly, raised his eyebrows when he saw her face and probably realized she was two decades or so younger than everyone else in the room, but then moved on to John, who still stood postured.

“Friends?” Sebastian repeated, sounding cynical and chuckling.

Emili frowned. Was that a comment on her age, John’s posture, or Sherlock’s antisocial habits? And, more than that, she couldn’t tell if it was meant to be a harmless tease or a deeper jibe.

“Is that a strange concept for you?” She asked guardedly with an innocent tip of her head, curious how he would respond. Emili could tolerate bullying from no one – not Donovan, not Anderson, not even Lestrade, and she certainly wasn’t going to stand by if someone was mocking her brother. Adopted family or not, Emili had never been able to put up with people who thought they had the right to push other people around and hurt their feelings for cheap laughs, and had gained a reputation in her public schools in America as the girl to _avoid_ when you were a known bully, which worked well for Emili and for her friends.

John threw her a look, likely making the connection between her tone of voice then and back when she’d gone off on Donovan the first night they’d met. “John Watson, MD.” He said, breaking from his stance and holding a hand out to Sebastian in invitation.

He never seemed to introduce himself to anyone as _Captain_ John Watson. It just occurred to Emili as he stated his degree. Despite his semi-conscious default to army-like behavior, he rarely credited himself with his own service when he introduced himself.

Sebastian shook his hand and took the excuse not to give a reply to Emili’s question, moving to stand behind his desk and lean over the table to greet John, who remained on the other side. Sebastian still looked surprised, and he tossed Sherlock an amused look like John and Emili were both part of some joke. Once he pulled out his chair and sat down, crossed his legs and leaned back comfortably, John and Emili glanced at each other surreptitiously. Emili saw her own uncertain and slightly annoyed feelings for Sebastian reflected in John’s eyes.

Who needed friends her age when she got along just as well with a middle-aged army doctor?

Sebastian coughed to clear his throat and held a hand out, palm facing upwards, to the chairs lined up on the guests’ side of his desk. “Well, grab a pew,” he invited. John pursed his lips but pulled out the chair on the far left. With Sherlock already to her right, Emili took the chair in between the two while Sherlock took the one closest to himself. “D’you need anything? Coffee, water…?”

Coffee actually sounded great, and Emili was, in part, thrilled to meet someone in Britain who offered coffee before they offered tea, but her slightly unreasonable stubbornness didn’t permit her to ask for any from someone who was ruffling her feathers in the wrong direction.

“No,” John politely declined.

The girl noticed that Sebastian didn’t even offer any to Sherlock; he had been looking right at John when he’d asked and had only spared a brief glance to Emili herself, never mind the consulting detective.

“You’re doing well,” Sherlock said, breaking the secondary silence that fell between Sebastian wasting time getting to why they were even there and John refusing a beverage. His coat collar was turned up around his neck. “You’ve been abroad a lot.”

“Well, some,” Sebastian agreed, his left hand reaching up behind his head and scratching at his neck, the watch face glinting with a sunlight glare from the windows.

“Flying all the way ‘round the world twice in a month?”

“Ha!” Then came the most obviously plastic smile yet. Sebastian took his hand away from his neck and pointed at Sherlock, his cheeks dimpled while he looked down at the desk, shaking his head mirthlessly. “Right. You’re doing that thing.

“We were at Uni together,” Sebastian told Emili, pointing still at Sherlock. In between listening to what he was saying and thinking that she should tell him that it’s rude to point at somebody for long periods of time like that, she nodded attentively. “This guy here had a trick he used to do-“

“It’s _not_ a _trick,”_ Sherlock muttered, affronted. His voice was petulant and annoyed, but he said it with resignation – the same sort of resignation Emili remembered hearing in her own voice when she told Liza the same thing over and over.

Sebastian completely disregarded that Sherlock had said anything! “-He could look at you and tell you your whole life story!”

“Yes,” John agreed, sending Sherlock a praising, genuine smile in front of Emili. “I’ve seen him do it.” He was still completely impressed with the deductions from John’s phone in the backseat of the taxi on their way to Lauriston Gardens.

Sebastian missed the clearly positive voice that John used and sniffed. “Put the wind up everybody!” He laughed like it was a joke but the words were real and mean in meaning, if not in the way that they were said. Emili had heard that before. It was the same way that people used to talk to their underclassmen and get away with it, because teachers couldn’t tell them off if it didn’t _sound_ like they were being rude. “We hated him…”

Emili bristled. _What a jerk!_ There was a difference between reminiscing on awkward college days and deliberately poking at old injuries. Someone who worked at Shad Sanderson in a snazzy and roomy office like Sebastian’s had to be smart enough to tell the difference.

She looked at Sherlock before she leapt to his defense to see if he was going to do it himself. Instead of an answer, she saw a brief, split-second of emotion, where Sherlock looked away from Sebastian and down at the color-flecked carpet, covering up an expression of hurt feelings before he thought anyone would see. It wasn’t obvious and it wasn’t dramatic. It was a tic, something that had obviously bothered him a lot before and hurt to be reminded of now.

_So much for being emotionless…_

“We’d come down to breakfast in the Formal Hall and this freak would know who’d been shagging who the previous night!” Sebastian tried to laugh with John, but he didn’t succeed, if only because John would have had to be laughing, too. John just looked uncomfortable and tried to feign interest to be respectful, but clearly he didn’t enjoy listening to someone talk down about his friend, and Emili certainly didn’t appreciate the use of the word ‘freak.’

“I simply _observed,”_ Sherlock huffed defensively.

Emili couldn’t bite her tongue on this any longer. “If it bothered you to have it pointed out,” she said, her voice turning imperious. It was just bad form to talk about college sex and insult your classmates, especially in front of a teenager. Emili may look older than she was, but she was still not someone that Sebastian knew well enough to take those liberties with. “Did it occur to you that it was maybe a sign you shouldn’t’ve been doing it to begin with?”

The double-meaning and the unintended euphemism only occurred to her as she was saying it and it was too late to change her phrasing.

Sebastian’s turn to look awkward as he excused what he had said. _Good,_ she thought in satisfaction. “Some things are meant to remain just between a couple and God, not broadcast to the entire campus population!” He exaggerated. Emili was at least ninety percent sure that it was being melodramatic. Sherlock didn’t seem like the type to vindictively spread rumors or start gossip – he just stated facts and drew conclusions into conversations like they were common knowledge.

Emili glared while Sebastian nervously laughed his way out of an angry friend chewing him out for being a jerk while Sherlock looked at her with interest. Emili had the feeling it had been a long time since someone had defended Sherlock, much less in front of him where he actually knew it had happened, and her heart went out to him. No one deserved to feel so alone that they were actually surprised when their friends stood up for them.

Sebastian pushed back against the floor with his feet and moved one arm across his chest, the other elbow resting halfway up his forearm with his hand near his mouth, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Emili privately wondered exactly how much thinking he was actually doing and how much of it was being done for him by the people he paid out on the sales floor. “Go on, then, pal, enlighten me.” He invited, voice edging on mocking. “Two trips a month, flying all the way around the world – well, you’re quite right.” He brushed his thumb over his lips, clearing his throat with a cough. “How could you tell? You’re gonna tell me there was, um, a stain on my tie from some special kind of ketchup you can only buy in Manhattan?”

_Go ahead, be more condescending,_ Emili scowled at him openly at that point, no longer caring about the impressions she was making. Not even Mycroft was as disrespectful as Sebastian was, and Mycroft could get up on a pretty high horse at times.

Sherlock narrowed his eyes. “No, I-“

Of course, despite begging answers, Sebastian wouldn’t even permit his old “friend” to reply. “Or maybe it was the mud on my shoes!” He chuckled.

A beat passed. Sebastian was quiet, finally being considerate enough to allow Sherlock to answer. By this point, Sherlock was just as finished with Sebastian as Emili was, if not more so, because he looked straight into his eyes and flatly explained, “I was just chatting with your secretary outside. She told me.”

Holding her tongue for the last few minutes had been worth it. Sebastian’s face was _priceless._ Comically panicked at being made to look like a jackass, he uncrossed his arms and gripped both of the arm rests on his chair, floundering for something to say to recover. Sherlock’s face was blank, but Emili didn’t try to hide the smile growing on hers. John frowned, but not at Sebastian – he leaned to look around Emili, frowning questioningly at Sherlock. Of course the detective hadn’t talked with the secretary. Few people kept his interest long enough to hold conversations with, and Sherlock detested pointless chatter made just to fill silence. John just didn’t get the somewhat petty reasoning for passing on the opportunity to show off.

Emili was delighted to find another aspect of their humors that she and Sherlock had in common, if only because it was benefitting her mood so well in the moment.

“Although, now that you mention it,” Emili did take Sherlock’s place in being the know-it-all. She couldn’t let him have all the fun of putting a real jerk in his place. “If, some Monday nights, you want to go traipsing around in the mud, you should probably put on some sneakers instead of your nice dress shoes.” Monday had been the last day that it had rained, and the most recent time for the man to have gotten mud on his shoes to begin with. She smiled sweetly at him while Sebastian’s nose twitched and he stared back at her with thinly-veiled irritation. Sherlock looked down at his lap and smirked.

For a solid twenty seconds, half of the people in the room were smug, a fourth of them were annoyed and contemptuous, and the final twenty-five percent was just questioning what had just happened and how long it would be before the Earth was put back upright.

Finally, Sebastian couldn’t take it anymore, and, although it was long overdue, he acted like he’d grown up. “Anyway, I’m glad you could make it over,” he lied. “We’ve had a break-in.”

Sebastian took the trio out of his office, but they didn’t go far. From his desk, he could see several of the desks out of his window. He led Emili, John, and Sherlock to the right of his office door and to another of the larger spaces in front of the trading posts. This door was closed.

“This is Sir William’s office – the bank’s former Chairman.” Down to business, Sebastian kept sounding clipped and on track. He may have been rude but at least now he wasn’t picking on Sherlock. “The room’s been left here like a sort of memorial. Someone broke in last night.”

Sebastian turned to stand with his back to the door and looked at the three. When he looked at Sherlock again he defensively raised his arms across his chest, uncomfortable with just having his hands down to his sides.

“What did they steal?” John asked in concern. It was a bank – there was presumably a lot they could steal, especially information on clients’ accounts.

“Nothing.” That bothered Emili – if nothing had been stolen, how did they know someone had broken in? It’s not like a window was broken by a stone; they were in the upper half of one of the tallest buildings in London! It wasn’t like just chucking a rock up to the second story. “Just left a little message.”

A yellow, white, and orange key card with a black magnetic strip was produced from Sebastian’s pocket and the man held the side with the strip down against the card pad to the right of the door. The light turned green after he held it for a few seconds and a mechanism made a soft _snick._ Sebastian tucked the card safely back inside his pocket and twisted the knob down, pushing it to open.

It took Emili a moment to realize what she was supposed to be seeing. The computer screen was dark, the photographs had been placed facing down on the desk, there were no folders in there. The filing cabinets were still there and closed, but if they’d had any information relevant to the bank, they’d probably been emptied. Nothing was amiss on the carpet. The only thing that seemed unusual was the completely clean state of the office, with what very few personal touches its owner had had being stereotypical to the point of being rather easy to look over.

The only thing that _wasn’t_ easy to look over was a painting, a portrait of an elderly man with grey hair in a grey formal suit, hands politely in front of him, sitting down, and staring towards the painter, which made for the odd, creepy effect of feeling like the portrait was watching you wherever you went in the room. Emili hoped it had been insured, because it seemed like the yellow painting over it wasn’t part of the original work, especially because it left the portrait and also expanded to the wall. Over the man’s painted eyes and brow was a long line of yellow paint. That was it. It was a lot of paint for one motion and had started to make trails going down. It _could_ have been done with a paintbrush, but the one stroke was fairly thin, and Emili doubted that a paintbrush thin enough to make that line would have been capable of holding enough paint to make the trails, too, so she guessed it was from a spray can.

To the left of the painting was another graffiti mark. The bright yellow paint had a horizontal line even with the other but on the white-painted wall, and underneath that one was what looked like a number 8, but with less curves and sharper edges, and the top loop didn’t connect, instead broken off with the top missing.

Sebastian looked over expectantly and stayed out of the way, not appearing to want to step inside the office. Sherlock stared at the painting marks with very rapt concentration even after Emili was done looking at them, so she turned to Sebastian and asked, “Don’t you have security cameras?”

It was reasonable to assume that the reason they were there was because Sebastian had seen something about Sherlock’s detective work in the media or maybe his website online and had assumed that their history in college would be reason enough to have the favor of a private detective’s help, regardless of how he’d evidently seemed to be one of Sherlock’s bullies, not friends. Which was all good, Emili supposed that was a fair enough reason to hire someone – knowing they’re competent is more important than liking them when you pay for a service – but a straightforward break-in seemed like it would be easy for them to catch, especially if they were a rich enough company to work in Tower 42.

Sebastian nodded to her. “Back to my office, lads,” he invited.

Sherlock whipped around, done with the graffiti in the blink of an eye, coat trailing off behind him while he went out the door that had been held open. John left lingering frowns in the paint’s direction while he followed after Sherlock because he didn’t want to be left out of the loop. Sebastian was obligated by responsibility to stay behind their abrupt departure to lock up the office for security and preservation purposes.

Emili hovered outside the doorway, but far enough away for him to have the space to lock the door and make sure that the mechanism kept it that way, smiling smugly.

“So you think Sherlock can solve this, right?” She questioned. She had yet to see someone as sharp as her brother, except for maybe Mycroft, so she wasn’t asking out of drawing her own confidence. She just wanted to rub it in Sebastian’s face exactly how much of a bastard he was being.

“If anyone can,” he answered, confident himself.

“So then maybe you should have spent less time bullying and more time listening to him?” She asked smartly. The unspoken _maybe you would have learned from him_ made Sebastian’s assured smirk fall from his face as he looked back at her, grinding his teeth. Emili grinned and held out her hand to shake. “Sherlock left out my last name,” she continued with a half-smirk pulling up her lips. “I’m Emili _Holmes._ His sister.”

The look of _I screwed up_ on his face made everything else worth it. It was almost as good as the whole travel-and-secretary thing, because how much lower can you get than talking badly about someone to their little sister?

Sebastian had state-of-the-art security cameras, and for all of the boasting that those cameras might have been able to do in other situations, they were, evidently, worthless when it came to the Shad Sanderson break-in. They stopped being video recorders and became cheap, scrappy cameras.

“Sixty seconds apart,” Sebastian narrated, holding the freeze-frame on the available greyed image on his computer screen, timestamped 23:33:01. He tapped the forward arrow key with the ring finger of his right hand. The next frame was an entire leap of time ahead – not a second passed, but sixty of them. The timestamp had become 23:34:01. “So someone came in here in the middle of the night, splashed paint around, and then left within a minute.”

The only differences in the frames besides the timestamps were the graffiti. One second, there’s nothing out of the ordinary. Exactly a minute later, the spray painted marks are vandalizing the office. Emili would have thought the camera would have been put out by a laser, but the laser damaging the camera for exactly sixty seconds and then making an instant recovery seemed strange. Her next guess would be someone hacking into the security system, but Shad Sanderson seemed to have the highest-expense lines of stability and security in their technology (not that it had done them much good the night previous). Her third suggestion would be someone tampering with the tapes, but that was slim for the same reasons as the previous.

For obvious reasons, Emili didn’t have much experience with crime in real life, but she had watched plenty of procedurals. She thought back to an American show where some of the main cast’s characters had broken into a consulate and tricked the security cameras by using a selfie stick to hold their phone in front of the camera lens. There would have been movement on the camera, had that been the case with the bank, but could they have located the cameras and then covered them somehow for exactly that amount of time without showing signs of movement?

“How many ways into that office?” Sherlock promptly answered. Emili had no idea if he had even had her thought process, or if he had skipped over parts, or if he had the entire thing and then another five minutes’ worth in the five seconds it felt like there was between Sebastian flipping back and forth on the frames and his response.

Sebastian stood up from the desk monitor and smirked at Sherlock, finding it interesting that even this much later, his old college classmate still wanted to get to the bottom of anything that wasn’t instantly obvious. _He’s a detective; what did you expect?_ Emili thought with another flash of irritation.

“That’s where this gets _really_ interesting,” Sebastian commented.

_Interesting for us normal people, or interesting for Sherlock?_

For some reason, Sebastian found it necessary to lead them all back out to the front reception to use one of the computers he temporarily took from a secretary, telling her to take a short break. While they were back out in the lobby of the bank and in the perfect position to marvel at the incredible interior of Tower 42, Emili couldn’t help but keep looking up and down, at the escalators, elevators, gold- and silver-plated banisters and the frosted glass panels between the metal banister and the end of the floor where the reception dropped off to overlook the lowest floor.

“Every door that opens in this bank, it gets logged, right here.” Sherlock and John weren’t as taken with the building as Emili still was. Was that what feeling star struck was like? “Every walk-in cupboard, every toilet…” While Sebastian showed them the log he was talking about on the monitor, Emili couldn’t keep her attention on a computer screen when there was so much to see.

Sightseeing wasn’t what she had been brought along for, although increasingly she felt like she and John were decorative pieces to Sherlock’s detective work. It seemed very infrequent that he actually needed their input to make progress. “And there was no activity in the office last night?” She asked despite not looking at the computer.

“Precisely,” Sebastian confirmed, not looking at her. That was okay; Emili wasn’t looking at him, either. He wasn’t exactly the _Magic Mike_ cast, so really, the architecture was a much better sight. “There’s a hole in our security. Find it, and we’ll pay you… five figures.” Sebastian clicked the tab on the monitor and stood up, clearing his throat. When Emili looked back to him, wondering if he’d been trying to get her attention, Sebastian produced a pre-written check from the interior of his blazer. “This is an advance,” he told Sherlock, holding the order towards him. “Tell me how he got in, and there’s a bigger one on its way.”

Sherlock didn’t even look at the check to see how much it was. Em supposed he didn’t really _need_ the money – his family may force him to generate his own income but she very highly doubted that his parents would tolerate him not being able to pay the rent – and she knew that trivialities weren’t really his thing.

He lifted his head higher. “I don’t _need_ an incentive, _Sebastian_.” Sherlock declared, speaking down to his former classmate as if he had been grievously offended by the offer of payment for services rendered. Coat whipping, he stalked away from the reception without taking the check, going on the route they’d taken out of the trading floor to get back into the bank.

Sebastian, John, and Emili all looked after the detective. Emili frowned at his back as he walked away. John grimaced like he was getting a headache; Sebastian just looked nostalgic. Evidently, Sherlock’s behavior hadn’t changed much in the last ten, fifteen years or so.

“He’s, uh, he’s kidding you. Obviously.” John started to reach for the check. Sebastian looked down at him cynically. “Shall I look after that for him?” While John looked up at Sebastian in question, Sebastian rolled his eyes and apparently decided _to hell with it._ He handed John the check, shaking his head, and walked off in the opposite direction. “Thanks…”

“So, five figures in America’s at least ten grand.” Emili stepped a little closer to John and looked over his shoulder, which was a pretty easy thing to do with her height advantage.

John held the check out in front of him and leaned back, staring at it incredulously and then looking around for Sebastian. “ _This_ is an _advance?”_

It wasn’t hard to find Sherlock. He had returned to the scene of the crime. John and Emili looked at Sherlock taking photographs of the graffiti with his phone, having gotten someone to open the office door for him, and he’d left it open while he observed.

The doctor and the teenager had a nonverbal argument over who was going to be left babysitting the investigator. After John looked particularly pleading, Emili sighed and waved him off. He smiled at her thankfully and went to go look elsewhere, maybe to grab a snack from the vending machines. Emili took another look at Sherlock through the floor-to-ceiling windows and then looked off towards the floor.

Sebastian wasn’t in sight, but his office door was closed and the light was on, so maybe he had gone back into solitude to take care of his own responsibilities. No one in the bank seemed to notice Emili was there, much less care about what a teenager was doing in the staff floor. Most of them were busy, tapping on their keyboards or answering the landlines at their desks, but she had to muse exactly how much concentration it would take away from their jobs if they just looked around and noticed what – or, rather, _who_ – was out of place. It wasn’t a bad idea to learn to be more aware of your surroundings. Even in her own apartment, when she was the only one home, Emili did sweeps of the room to make sure everything was as she’d left it.

While she was thinking about it – Emili turned back around to look through the tan wooden blinds on the inside of the office and thought her heart had just fallen out of her chest. Her stupid brother was standing _outside of the window,_ precariously on a narrow balcony step that Emili really didn’t think was safe. She covered her mouth before she made any noise, not wanting to startle him, and hurried into the office.

Sherlock wasn’t outside for long before he came back to the interior of the room, and Emili’s heart started to slow down. That was a _long_ fall. She had always liked going up high on roller coasters to feel the adrenaline rush as they plunged back down, but since she had almost fallen from the roof of a college building, she was a lot less inclined to feel that rush. More sensitive to heights, Emili chose not to look up nearby amusement parks.

Still, what would the world look like from so high up? What would _London_ look like from so high up? While Sherlock disregarded the thought of closing out the window (which Emili hadn’t realized until then was intended to open, fastened to a hinge), she crept over to the opening and put her foot up hesitantly on the ledge, leaning outside, her hands inside the office and holding onto the glass window to her left.

At first it was breathtaking, like riding to the top of a Ferris wheel and then looking out at the carnival, all lights and color and noise and usually pounding music, either pop or upbeat, instrumental fairground pieces. The lack of dark-light contrast that a carnival ride had was made up for by the scenery being so exotic. Emili had never seen a city quite like London. The streets seemed narrow up here and the people like pinpricks on a map. Cars looked like toys and buildings that had seemed large from the ground looked like she could build them with Legos, or pinch them between her fingers.

Emili could see the Gherkin, only a fourth of it now higher than she was, but the sunlight and the angle gave her an entirely new perspective on the artistry that went into its architecture. The light hit the black dome of the top of the Gherkin and made the black shine a deep, rose-colored pink instead. She could see a blue-purple haze of lights from another district miles and miles away. She even tried to pick out the most iconic tourist sites, but she couldn’t find the clock tower or the London Eye, and she supposed that even if they were close enough, which, by her exploration of the city, they were, she was probably looking in the wrong direction out of the office and they might be on the other side of the tower.

A gentle breeze played with her pink hair and made a few strands lift from her shoulders and fly across her face, temporarily in her view before they smacked against her forehead and then fell down when the wind subsided, hanging in front of her eyes. Emili felt like she was on top of the world – breathing the freshest air, feeling the coolest draft, and seeing more than she ever could have seen from the streets below.

Then she actually looked down, and it was a long fall. The understanding of _why_ Sherlock might have stepped entirely onto the ledge fell away, replaced with tension that overtook her posture and an anxiety for the stories between herself and the concrete. There may not be a serial killer trying to poison her, but she was significantly higher than she had been at Roland-Kerr.

She swallowed and it stuck in her throat. Her stomach flipped. She should have climbed back into the office but instead she was frozen. An intrusive thought told her she should jump and see how long it took to hit the ground. She batted the fleeting impulse for self-annihilation away easily, but the anxiety that provoked it wasn’t so easy to get rid of.

Suddenly there were heavy hands on her shoulders and Emili almost screamed, for a millisecond thinking she was being pushed, but no – she was pulled back inside, away from the ledge. She shouldn’t have stepped out, not when she knew that heights could be a trigger, and she stood inside while Sherlock closed the window, grateful that he had not only noticed the rising panic, but done something about it.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Holmeses follow a new lead to a dead end.

After a few moments, Emili felt back to normal, and she was glad that John had left to go do whatever it was he had wanted. Sherlock took her out of the bad situation but didn’t start lecturing her or asking if she was okay because she was very clearly not harmed. It was a dark moment for her and she wanted to forget it, not rehash it because John was worried she might do something to hurt herself.

Right after closing the window, Sherlock was done with the office. The graffiti no longer held his interest, or so it seemed. He let her be in the office while he rushed out. Emili followed more slowly and by the time she was out of the former bank employee’s room, Sherlock wasn’t in sight. Rubbing the back of her neck, Emili looked around for him. He couldn’t have gone _that_ far in the short time he hadn’t been in her field of vision.

_Pop!_ There, like a gopher, the black-haired, blue-eyed man popped back up from behind a desk to the far left on the trading floor, looking right at the office, and then before she could do anything, he disappeared below the desks again.

… _Okay, that’s even weirder than normal._

Sherlock did his whack-a-mole impersonation another several times. Each time, he looked right at the window to the graffiti. Amused and feeling a little bit of second-hand embarrassment when he bumped into an employee and made him stumble back into someone else’s desk, she looked through the window, too, trying to figure out what the _hell_ he was doing.

And Emili realized that, from where she was standing, she couldn’t see the graffiti on the portrait. Then she looked over to the desk Sherlock had looked at the window from and realized something important about the angle – from that desk, there was no way he would have been able to see the paint, either. The angle was too radical.

Eventually Sherlock stopped jumping up and down behind the desks and disturbing the traders, just running behind them and continually looking up to see through the blinds of the office. Not to say that he stopped disturbing the traders, because they were definitely disturbed, a lot of them stopping to stare.

Looking to see who might have been able to see the graffiti’s location from outside of the office wasn’t the first thing Emili wanted to do, but she used the faster method that seemed to have not occurred to Sherlock. She moved to a place where she could see it from right outside the window, then backed up. As she got further away, her perspective changed. Parts of the paint were covered up with the obstructive blinds, and there wasn’t a point where she could see all of it clearly.

She bumped into the front of someone else’s desk. A blonde woman who was still on the phone had stopped talking and looked up through her glasses to stare at Emili. Em smiled and mouthed ‘sorry’ and moved to the right, walking through the gap between her desk and the next trader’s, moved behind the woman’s chair, and looked again. Yes, she could still see a hint of the spray paint.

She repeated the process several times. At one point, several rows of desks back, she had to move to her left to keep the graffiti within her sight – and at that desk, which was all the way to the back, she could finally see all of the graffiti within the gaps of the blinds. Cocking her head, she pulled out the empty chair from an absent trader and plopped down. It was only partially visible sitting down, but when she stood up again, it was clear as day.

Sherlock was only halfway through the desks when Emili had reached her conclusion and she was a little bit proud of herself for finding the right point first. “Sherlock!” She called, waving her brother over. She would have apologized for disturbing the environment, but she was putting an early end to Sherlock’s silly antics, so it balanced out.

There was a nameplate on the desk, but instead of a name on the plaque, it was _Hong Kong Desk Head_. While Sherlock politely and unwantedly pushed in a man’s chair, pushing him closer to his desk to make room to walk behind him, Emili dropped down into a squat to reach the drawers of the desk and pulled them open. There weren’t locks on the drawers, thankfully, so it was easy to pull them open and look through the supplies and folders inside. Everything was very neatly organized.

Joining her, Sherlock saw the symbols and then moved first to one side of the desk, then the other, confirming that the Hong Kong desk was the only one with a good view of the graffiti. Emili picked up a paper from the top of the middle drawer on the right, _Trade Report Issue #614_ with handwriting for the name, department, accounting information, and a signature.

Edward Van Coon’s signature, to be exact – whoever worked at this desk and handled the Hong Kong trading finances.

John waited until the residents of 221 Baker Street were all on the descending escalator, steeply inclined to efficiently carry its passengers to the ground floor while taking up as little space as possible. Emili held onto the sliding rail that moved with the conveyor of steps and looked over the side as the floor came closer and closer. She went from feeling like the Queen of the World to feeling like a normal human on an escalator the closer they got.

“Two trips ‘round the world, this month.” Going by his voice, John had been mulling the question over in his own head for a long time, possibly since Sherlock had smartly made Sebastian look like a fool. “You didn’t ask his secretary. You said that just to irritate him,” John accused. The veteran was more amused than chiding.

“And make him look like a fool,” Emili chipped in, crossing her arms proudly. She had barely met Sebastian, and she was already ready to risk expanding Sherlock’s ego even further by admitting that his clever lie had been well-delivered. “He had it coming.”

She stole a look at her brother, biting gently on her lip. Em wasn’t exactly _dying_ to have his approval, but once in a while, it would be nice to be acknowledged. She was agreeing with him and condoning his actions, which had been a bit jerk-ish themselves, so she thought she warranted at least a glance in her direction. Instead, she saw Sherlock expressing a slight smirk, looking down towards the descending escalator stairs.

“But seriously,” John pressed inquisitively. “How did you know?”

Sherlock cleared his throat and looked up. Emili was standing on the stair behind both of them, which put her head even higher than Sherlock’s. She looked down on both of her neighbors with a pleased, calm smile while they talked back and forth. The teenager was just as content to shut up and listen and take things in sometimes as she was to be in the center of everything.

“Did you see his watch?” The detective asked, seemingly without any actual relevance.

“His _watch?”_ John repeated, just getting more and more confused.

“The time was right, but the date was wrong,” Sherlock explicated, his words coming out fast and hurried. He didn’t want to waste time speaking too slowly, lest he lose time that he could otherwise spend doing something he considered more productive. Once the escalator deposited the trio on the ground floor, Emili was certain that she and John would be following after an enthusiastic consultant again. “It said two days ago; crossed the dateline twice, but didn’t alter it.”

The doctor nodded slowly. When it was all spelled out, the clues that Sherlock used to draw his conclusions seemed so painfully obvious that Emili and John both felt a little bit silly after they’d had to have them explained. “And… within a month? How’d you get that part?”

Sherlock held his chin higher, all but preening underneath the huge Belstaff coat. “New Breitling. Only came out this February.”

John nodded, looking up at the high ceiling. Emili tipped her head back to follow his eyes, but the roof was so high up and so far away that she wasn’t even sure she was making out the ceiling around the elaborate chandelier that had to be thousands of dollars’ worth… _euros,_ she had to remind herself.

“Okay. D’you think we should sniff around here for a bit longer?” John offered, sounding to be a little bit curious about the potential case.

Sherlock shook his head once, fringe flopping. “Got everything I need to know already, thanks,” he declared, stepping off of the escalator a touch early. He was already striding off of the metal cover panel at the base of the mechanism when John’s stair started to flatten to continue back up the conveyor. Emili hopped off and wrapped her arms around her midsection to follow.

“Hm?” John stared at Sherlock’s back in question.

The sixteen-year-old took a few faster steps to catch up to John. Sherlock had evened out his pace and John had fallen into step just a few feet behind, so as long as she kept up with the army doctor, she had a pretty good chance of staying in the loop.

“Like Sebastian said,” Em explained to John, uncrossing her arms and instead pushing her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “That graffiti was a message. I don’t think he realized how accurate he was.” She canted her head at Sherlock’s back. He strode purposefully in a beeline towards the front doors. John and she had to speed up to avoid being separated from him by the crowd. “It can only be clearly seen by one desk in the entire office. Other desks, walls, decorations, and pillars all get in the way.”

“We find the intended recipient, and…” Sherlock stated over his shoulder, prompting John to follow along with their line of thought. He didn’t slow up, just raised his voice.

“They’ll lead us to the person who sent it,” John guessed, looking up with some minor excitement.

The three broke out of the tower and into the London streets again. Upon being assailed with the painfully bright natural sun, Emili squinted and lowered her head while she and John chased after their third companion. Sherlock moved to the left side of the sidewalk to give Emili and John the option of hurrying into step beside him instead of following behind and trying to hear him speak over his shoulder.

“Obviously,” he said dryly. He seemed to be of the opinion that John’s discovery had lost some of its drama once he was the third person to realize it. “And, of course, the message was left at eleven thirty-four last night. That tells us a lot.”

“Does it?” John cocked his head, not getting what was important about that particular time.

Sherlock nodded. Emili looked around, paying attention to where he was leading them. They were going further down the street, getting some space between themselves and the foot traffic entering and exiting Tower 42 in seemingly equal and endless measure. She checked over her shoulder, turned back around, and put the tower and the Gherkin out of her mind to the best of her ability.

“Traders come to work at all hours. Some trade with Hong Kong in the middle of the night.” _Well, that doesn’t make sense,_ Emili was about to argue, but widened her eyes at herself and almost smacked her forehead. _Yes, it does. Time zones._ British traders came to the office at irregular hours to correspond with the Hong Kong traders, whom were awake during their normal times. “That message was intended for someone who came in at midnight. Not many Van Coons in the phonebook.”

No, Emili supposed there wouldn’t have been. It wasn’t a very common name. Sherlock threw his arm in the air, stepping to the curb of the street. “Taxi!” He called to an approaching yellow cab, which threw its brake lights on and came careening to a stop, skidding and throwing back some rocks from the street behind its wheels.

Finally, there was a setting that Emili was familiar with. The metropolis-like apartment complex loomed over forty stories over their heads, gleaming silver along the sides. She stepped back on the concrete front entry. The steps leading up to the doors from the right and left met in the middle on a platform, which was guarded by a tall, thin-barred rail. Emili craned her head back to try to see the top of the building.

“What do we do now?” John asked, frustration beginning to color his voice after yet another unsuccessful attempt at ringing the corresponding doorbell. On each side of the double-doors, there was a metal panel mounted to the wall. The panels each held two tall columns of buttons aside name plates. “Sit here and wait for him to come back?”

Despite apparently thinking that Van Coon wasn’t going to answer, John jabbed his thumb against the circular button next to his name yet again. Emili winced. If anyone _was_ in that apartment, she didn’t envy them the number of times John had rung for them. Sherlock studied the names passively, using his height advantage to look over John’s shoulder while looming.

“It _could_ just be paranoia,” Emili reasoned, trying not to be too sarcastic. It was hard to push back the impulse, however, when she felt that logic could have been used to discredit John’s suggestion. “But I’m pretty sure messages left covertly in the middle of his workplace aren’t exactly friendly. He might have run, or he might not trust us to talk, even if we do wait long enough.” She paused, tilted her head to the doors, and narrowed her eyes. There was only one feasible way to get inside without the help of law enforcement, which would take too long. They’d lose what little edge they had while they were arguing with Lestrade. “Let’s get in ourselves,” she suggested.

Predictably, John wasn’t all for it. “How?” He asked her, indicating the card reader on the side of the door. Without possessing one, they couldn’t enter the building. Emili admired the security precaution, but she wished that it didn’t have to be installed on the one apartment complex she actually wanted to get into. “You need a key.”

Had Van Coon been there, it wouldn’t have been a problem, because they could’ve talked to him over the intercom and gotten him to unlock the doors from his apartment. It was a neat setup, but there were too many ways to exploit it. Emili mulled over one of them while she reached for the handle of the door on the right and tugged it towards her experimentally. The bottom of the door’s seal slid on the doorframe, but it didn’t move more than a centimeter.

“Or an inside participant,” she corrected John, turning to look at the name plates next to the buttons. “He had to have neighbors. We can say we’re concerned,” she tried to sell it. Sherlock wasn’t going to care about a minor infraction, but John was far less likely to be okay with Emili committing what had the potential to escalate into a misdemeanor.

For the first time since getting out of the taxi at the curb, Sherlock cleared his throat with a forced cough and spoke. “Just moved in.”

Both Emili and John looked over at him, John stepping away so that he could look at Sherlock from the side instead of trying to see behind him. “What?” John asked, disgruntled.

“The floor above,” Sherlock impatiently explained, raising a gloved hand and pointing out the name plate above Van Coon’s. The newest one was labeled “Wintle,” and its cardstock was the brightest and cleanest of the rest of them. The name was drawn with a black Sharpie. “New label.”

John blinked at it, grudgingly conceded that it looked newer than the others, and halfheartedly countered, “Could have just replaced it.”

Sherlock’s expression was chiding. “No one ever does that,” he lectured John.

Emili pursed her lips. If they were just going to waste time arguing, then Emili was going to take an action. She was curious, damn it, and with any luck, they could solve this case and get back home in time for her to finish her reading goal in Jane Austen. The sooner she got that essay done, the sooner she could put aside the book and never pick up _Pride and Prejudice_ again.

When she stuck her finger on the button and held it down, it echoed a tinny, buzzing sound, almost like the error noise on a game show. Sherlock and John both shut up as soon as they heard it. Emili waited for a response.

It took a few seconds, but the new tenant was available. The communication system was turned on. It worked like a walkie-talkie between the two stations, one out at the front of the building and the other inside the apartment.

_“Hello?”_ A woman’s voice politely asked, a little bit loudly.

_Oh, good, it’s a woman._ Emili knew that if she were going to let someone inside, she’d be more comfortable if it were someone of the same sex. She also presumed that women were more inclined to trust female voices than men were.

Adopting a false British accent, Emili greeted her enthusiastically, forcing a grin onto her face so that her tone sounded friendly and open. “Hi!” She beamed. “Um, yeah, I don’t know if you know him, but I’m here to visit my cousin?” Out the corner of her eye, she saw John’s expression change as he stared at Emili as if seeing her for the first time. The accent felt weird, but Emili thought she was doing a pretty decent job at replicating Molly’s. Being surrounded by people who spoke with it made it easier to forge. “He lives in the flat just below you.”

_“Ah… no, I wouldn’t.”_ Wintle was buying into it. She sounded apologetic, and Em mentally thanked Sherlock for being right. She didn’t know where she’d begin to backpedal if it turned out that Wintle really had just replaced her name plate. _“I’ve just moved in.”_

Sherlock coughed quietly into his elbow. Emili whipped her head to look over her shoulder and saw both men staring at each other, John with annoyance and Sherlock with pride. Her brother smirked at the doctor. Emili flipped some pink hair out of the way as she held a finger over her lips, glaring, before she went on.

“I’m really sorry to bug you, but his shift’s been extended at the bank and I’m usually in Chiswick, so I don’t have a key…”

_“Do you want me to buzz you in?”_ Wintle offered kindly.

Emili giggled in relief. “Would you please?”

There wasn’t a reply, but a moment later, the doors clicked loudly as they unlocked. Emili grabbed at the handle and pulled it back quickly before they could lock again, and she held the heavy door open for her companions.

It could have been her imagination, but she thought Sherlock seemed a little bit proud when he strode past her and into the building, fixing his scarf after it had been blown out of place by a breeze. John paused, stopping in his tracks and staring at her, half-inside.

Emili dropped her accent and reverted back to speaking like an American. It was much easier to transition back, and it was relaxing to not have to police her own speech. “So, Lestrade says law school, but I’m thinking actress,” she conversationally shared. “Am I convincing?”

She waved for John to go inside. He moved his feet again, but by the time Emili had entered herself and closed the door behind her, John was still standing stationary just indoors and Sherlock had already called for an elevator to come pick them up.

“How did you do that?” The doctor asked her, impressed and trying not to sound as though he condoned the lies she’d just told.

It didn’t seem like a big deal to the teenager. So she had lied. Everyone lied, at some point or another, and although she might feel bad later about conning a generous civilian, ultimately, she was investigating a crime that freaked out someone else. Maybe Van Coon was in danger. She figured that since she had the right intentions, it wasn’t too terrible.

“It’s not hard,” she answered, rubbing the back of her head. “Try faking _my_ accent.”

John shook his head, not even attempting it. “I’ve tried before,” he confessed, still just as British as he’d been a moment ago. “Can never get it right.”

“Oh…” Emili thought back to the times where she had jokingly mimicked various accents with her friends. Her teachers usually told her she had an impressive ear. Maybe that helped her to pick up on accents. She wouldn’t have known if it was harder for someone else than it was for her. “Huh.” It wasn’t of much consequence, and being able to sound like she fit in didn’t seem like a disadvantage, so she shrugged it off and gestured for John to join her with Sherlock. “Well, I guess I’ll blame it on BBC America.”

Once they’d gotten to the right floor, Sherlock led the way with his swishing coat to the apartment number found at the bank. Emili kept looking at both sides of the hallway curiously. The doors were perfect matches to each other, barring the different golden numbers adhered to the fronts underneath the peep holes. The odd numbers were on her right and the evens on her left, and each had a standard, solid black welcome mat.

Sherlock slipped his hand to the doorknob on the apartment at the left end of the hall and tried the door. The knob wiggled a little bit, but the mechanism prevented it from opening. The metal made a stubborn, click-y noise. John sighed when he heard, but Emili just reached for her pocket and took out her wallet.

“Well, this has been great and all.” John obviously thought that the trip was shaping up to be _not_ great, but Emili wasn’t so sure that it had been a waste of time. She opened up her billfold and took out the first card she saw – the credit card she held in Mycroft’s name. “But now how are we going to get in? Can’t exactly get buzzed through a key lock.”

Sherlock smirked when Emili held up her credit card, and he stepped away from the door in an invitation. “Oh, John,” he sighed piteously at the shorter man’s confusion.

“Like this!” Emili explained cheerily, dropping down onto her knees before the door.

She had to hold her head close to the wood to see into the doorjamb. All she could see was a sliver of space, but it was enough to make out where the gleaming silver was. She pressed the edge of the credit card straight alongside the door, covered that metal lock, and then pulled her card away on the edge closer to her. The other was angled and pushed against the lock, forcing it to depress. Em reached for the door with her left hand and gave it a gentle push. It eased open and she kept her card in hand as she stood up.

She turned to look at both of her neighbors proudly, a crooked grin on her face. Her father had showed her how to do that once before and her mother had given him an earful for it, but Emili was grateful now that he had shown her the many unorthodox uses of bank cards.

John had his eyes fixated on her, and he stared at the natural blonde with some dulled alarm. “I am honestly becoming increasingly concerned that you know how to do these things,” he said to her, crossing his arms.

Emili shrugged her shoulders, her smile falling slightly. She made a mental note that John didn’t approve. Sherlock clearly did, and she did want him to tolerate her, but John was the one who paid her more attention and made sure that she had everything she needed. Sherlock and Mycroft did the bare minimum of caretaking, and John had no obligation to do any, yet he went beyond what he should’ve.

“Hush,” Sherlock snapped shortly, brushing past Emili without a second thought, or a look back to the two of them. “He could be inside.”

John and Emili made eye contact again, the door staying wide open. _Please?_ She mouthed hopefully, her shoulders up and her hands clasped together. Investigating with Sherlock was easily the most interesting thing she’d ever do in London, and the last thing she wanted to do was stop, but she also didn’t want to annoy John too much.

The blond looked in through the doorway, then darted his eyes out as soon as he caught himself. He looked frustrated with himself for his impulse, but uncrossed his arms and made a waving motion to beckon her inside. “Alright then,” he sighed. Emili squealed quietly and ran in after her brother.

The apartment belonged to a man with cash to burn. The furniture in the parlor was all made of leather – and it was _white,_ too, which was a gutsy move for anyone to make. It all looked spotless, which made Emili think that Van Coon hadn’t been spending much time at home. One cabinet over the stove was ajar, and there were crumbs on the counter, so she at least knew that he lived here.

The tall fridge hummed in the kitchen attached to the parlor. The apartment was divided into the larger kitchen and living area and two rooms that took up the rest of the space. Their doors were parallel to each other. Sherlock pushed one open and disappeared inside, coattails brushing away from his calves.

She didn’t want to touch anything, but she did roll her sleeve down over her hand to open up the fridge. No one came barreling out of hiding, and no one called out to them. Either Van Coon was unconscious or he wasn’t there.

His fridge was full of alcohol. Sparkling champagne was unopened on the top shelf, and the lower half of the fridge was stocked with enough Sauvignon to cater to a frat party. John ventured to the bookshelf near the balcony’s sliding doors like he was magnetized due books.

Emili closed the refrigerator and fixed her sleeve before her hand stretched it out. “Something seems off about this apartment,” she called out to Sherlock, turning around slowly and taking in the living room again. It made her nervous to have such a room at her back. It felt impersonal, which didn’t belong in an apartment.

“What is it?” John asked her, turning from the books with his hands securely in his coat pockets. He shifted, a little antsy, wanting to leave.

Em shrugged halfheartedly. It wasn’t that she felt threatened. It was just – _off._ “I don’t know,” she said with a grimace. Sure, parts of the place looked too perfect, but it wasn’t that. “It just seems weird.”

Sherlock exited the door he had pushed open and left it wide. He thumbed through a thinly-bound journal opened over his palm, paper rustling and crinkling like it was old or very dry.

“What does it mean if one man’s items are mirrored by another’s?” He questioned, skimming rapidly over the text in the book he held. He crossed to the balcony, slammed the book shut, and gave it a toss. John lunged to catch it impulsively and looked very annoyed once he realized what he’d done.

“Stalking?” The teenager suggested while Sherlock pulled open the sliding door to the balcony.

Sherlock went outside and stepped into the railing. He braced his hands on the safety rail and leaned over, peering down towards the street below. From up on this floor, the noises that seemed so loud when they were on the street had taken on a muffled quality.

Emili tapped the short edge of her credit card against the heel of her left hand and drew her feet slowly through the parlor. Even the carpet was white. She grimaced and was glad that Mrs. Hudson wasn’t such a neat freak. She liked her space tidy, but even Emili didn’t have the patience to scrub her carpets every week.

The door across from the one Sherlock had gone inside of was firmly closed, not even open a crack. A light from inside passed through under the gap between the door and the floor. She raised her hand and rapped sharply on the wood, and when no one answered, she tried the knob. It was locked.

She glanced over her shoulder. She could see a desk and a book case in the room behind her. _An office,_ she guessed, turning back to the one before her and lowering down onto her knees. _So this would be the bedroom._ She worked her card into the slit between the doorjamb and the lock and started to wiggle it against the mechanism.

Emili’s curiosity was probably going to get her hurt worse than it already had one of these days. She stood up as she reflected on how much trouble she would be in if Lestrade found out she was breaking into peoples’ apartments and gave the door a gentle kick with the toe of her shoe.

She only made it a step into the bedroom before she panicked when she saw what – or, rather, who – was on the bed. _“Sherlock!”_ She shrieked on impulse, raising her hands to cover her mouth. Like she’d stepped into concrete, she remained in place, staring with wide eyes at the blood splatters on the bedspread and the adjacent wall. Her eyes darted between the ruined linens, the blood-matted hair, and the sleek barrel of the smoking gun.

Footsteps hurried to the bedroom. There were two sets. The faster ones were John’s. He came in first, partially because he had also been closer. Sherlock stopped to close the balcony door first, and the sliding noise met Emili’s ears distantly.

“Yes, what is it?” The detective started to ask impatiently, no doubt prepared to scold her about keeping her voice down.

Emili trembled, dropping her hands to her chest and then hugging herself tightly. John and Sherlock both took account of the room and John stepped up to Emili’s side, winding his arm tightly around her shoulders.

Lying sideways on the bed with his brains blown out of his skull was Van Coon, still in his work suit. The banker had a strong resemblance to Sebastian, except for the matted and messy state of his hair and the deadly pallor to his face. There was a gun up by the left side of his head, but while the grip was holding down his fingers, his hand was slack underneath the weapon.

John tugged Emili tightly to him and turned her into his body. She put her head down and leaned on him while he urged her out of the bedroom. “Shh,” he crooned, rubbing his hand on her upper arm. “We’re gonna get you something to drink, alright? You don’t have to keep looking at this.”

Although the veteran took her out of the room and into the kitchen, Emili’s fingers shook so hard that she couldn’t control her hand well enough not to splash the contents of a bottle of water on her shirt. She just kept seeing how starkly the blood contrasted with the all-white furniture.


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The private investigators meet a new detective inspector.

In spite of it being a crime scene, Sherlock, John, and Emili weren’t immediately kicked out of the apartment when technicians from Scotland Yard arrived. Neither Anderson nor Donovan were among the first responders, but, dare she say it, the team that came to catalog evidence and document the scene were faster and more efficient than the group Emili had been consulting with on and off.

“Do you think he’d lost a lot of money?” John asked Sherlock, his arm around Emili’s waist while the pink-haired girl sipped on a half-empty bottle of water. Her tremors were under control after a few minutes and a little forced chatter. “I mean, suicide is pretty common among city boys.”

Sherlock gave John a long-suffering stare. “We don’t know that it was suicide,” he told his flatmate sternly with a lecturing tone. Sherlock very rarely actually lectured, but the way he spoke and the way that John and Emili both knew he was incredibly smart made it easy to feel patronized by just one sentence.

“Come on,” John snorted, arguing quietly. “The door was locked from the inside.”

Em swallowed hard and played with the top of her water, screwing it on and off and then on again. “I used to lock my sister out of my room by twisting the lock and then shutting the door behind me,” she recalled quietly, glancing up to the right side of the apartment, where she knew a corpse laid in the small bedroom. “A killer could’ve done the same.”

Sherlock paced in front of his neighbors. Emili surveyed him worriedly. His aggravation wasn’t too alarming in itself, but sometimes it did concern her when he acted so short and snappish. It usually preceded him saying something mean to someone. Typically, the recipients were an annoyed John, a furious Emili, or an offended and hurt Mrs. Hudson. Emili still didn’t know how to calm him down from his moods, so more often than not, she tried to bother him into snapping at her to save her friends the trouble. Em knew not to take it too personally.

“He’s been away three days, judging by the laundry.” Sherlock nodded off towards the bedroom as he turned around and started to pace away from it. “Look in his case. There was something tightly packed inside it.”

“Thanks, I’ll take your word for it.” John answered irritably, smiling politely and thinly at a CSI member with a long ginger ponytail.

Sherlock stopped, held his wrists behind his back, and leaned his head forward, peering at John closely. “Problem?” He asked, looking to John’s hand at Emili’s waist and then back up to the blond’s face.

“Yeah,” John bluntly replied, giving Sherlock an exasperated and frustrated scowl. “I’m not exactly desperate to root around some bloke’s dirty underwear.”

Sherlock sniffed, as if such concerns were beneath him for the sake of discovery, and started to walk back and forth again. He resembled a cage cheetah. Although breaking in had been her idea, Emili was beginning to wish Lestrade would hurry up, arrive, and shoo them all off. She had always thought dead bodies were no big deal, but she found very quickly that seeing them in person was different from seeing photographs.

The detective brought his left hand to his face and rubbed his chin, then scratched down his neck. It looked painfully forceful. “Those symbols at the bank, the graffiti,” Sherlock complained. “Why were they put there?”

John glanced up at the ceiling but played along. “Some sort of code?” He guessed.

Emili had thought that that much was obvious. “Well, it had to mean _something,_ or he wouldn’t have run home and gotten a gun,” she pointed out.

Sherlock didn’t acknowledge either of them, although John did blink and make an expression that strongly suggested he saw the teenager’s logic.

“Why were they painted? If you want to communicate, why not use email?”

Em picked up her shoulders tiredly. Her curiosity hadn’t been sated, but she wasn’t enjoying the atmosphere of the apartment. Most of the investigators left them alone, but there was something about being in a dead person’s apartment that made her antsy. She was fidgetier still because she knew that evidence was being collected off of the man’s person just yards away and through a wall.

“Electronic correspondence leaves a trail.” She offered. If it had been a threat, then she could see why leaving traces would be undesirable. But why go to the trouble of staging a break-in to Shad Sanderson if the only intention was to send a message? Why not use a courier, or the postal service? – Or even just slip a note under the door, since the killer clearly had Van Coon’s address?

“Maybe he wasn’t answering.” John also indulged.

“Good, you follow.” Sherlock sounded slightly relieved.

“No,” John denied, making his roommate press his lips tightly.

“Are we sure he was killed by the same person?” Emili asked aloud, wondering at the coincidence.

“Beyond a reasonable doubt. The break-in at the tower had all the same hallmarks as this, minus the smoking gun, so to speak.” The young woman just blinked, so the detective explained slowly. “Both locked, both high enough to be seemingly impossible to climb to the windows, both leaving no trace of whom was here. Given the immeasurable coincidence that both very conspicuous events would happen in the same morning, I conclude that the murder and the message are indeed connected.” Her brother steepled his hands under his chin while he walked briskly back and forth. “What kind of a message would everyone try to avoid?”

Em thought back to that morning and remembered seeing John casting aside a bill about payments. “Taxes, bills, invoices…”

Sherlock stopped and reached down into his pocket. Those in his Belstaff coat were deep and carried a lot, but he usually kept them empty. Sherlock carefully pulled out a crumpled up piece of dark paper and held it out for Emili and John to see. John looked less impressed than normal. Now that it was out, Em saw it was folded like origami into the shape of a small, sharp flower.

“Yes… he was being threatened.” Sherlock calmly explained, displaying the origami as if it explained everything. “This was stuffed inside his mouth.”

Emili and John both looked at him in disgust, albeit for different reasons.

The latter objected, “You reached into a dead man’s mouth?!”

“You disturbed the evidence!” Emili scolded. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw him smirk as he turned away and pocketed the flower again.

“Bag this up, will you?” A loud, masculine voice rang through the apartment after the door opened and shut out of sight. The newcomer was a stranger. “And see if you can get prints off this glass,” he added as he walked into the parlor-slash-kitchen, shooting looks at the messy countertop.

The CSI member he had been talking to went to go get evidence bags from a supply box on the floor set up near the group combing the pure white furniture. The man who’d given the orders scanned the room with his eyes and then approached the trio of civilians, rolling his head on his neck as if gearing up for a fight. He appeared easily two decades younger than Lestrade. His hair was a little shorter and had a little more gingery color to the light brown, and his face looked rounder and youthful. He carried himself importantly, but his suit jacket was noticeably larger than his waist and the knot of his tie was up very close to his neck. While professional, he looked to Emili like he was trying very hard to come off as stern, severe, and serious.

“Ah, Sergeant.” Sherlock greeted, holding his hands behind his back innocuously. He tried to smile pleasantly at the man who was definitely from Scotland Yard, but his expression was see-through and impatient. “We haven’t met.”

The man was much shorter than Sherlock and barely taller than John, which meant Emili was at a perfect height to look right into his eyes and see it as he braced himself to say what he had rehearsed in his head.

“I know who you are, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t tamper with any of the evidence.” He growled boldly at Sherlock, holding his chin high importantly and keeping his arms still at his sides to show confidence.

_Too late for that,_ Emili winced apologetically but knew better than to rat out her brother.

He had no way of knowing what Sherlock had done already, so she thought it was mean of him to just treat them like that and assume that they were going to break rules. “I’m so sorry we’ve offended you by existing in the same space,” Emili sarcastically commented, her tightening grip on her water making the plastic crinkle.

Sherlock’s civil smile dropped faster than bricks out a window. “I’ve phoned Lestrade,” he stated straightforwardly. “Is he on his way?”

“He’s busy,” the brunet responded quickly. “I’m in charge.” He put his hands on his hips and used his left hand to push the hem of his jacket out of the way of his waist, just enough so that his badge showed where it was on his belt. “And it’s not _sergeant,_ it’s detective inspector. Dimmock.”

He put his right hand out stiffly to John, who looked from the man’s face to his hand with a put-upon face. After a second, John used the arm not around Emili to shake the man’s hand and get it over with.

Dimmock turned around and strode towards the bedroom, but he stopped right outside the doorframe and kept sending suspicious darts of his eyes towards the trio of independent investigators.

“I’ve known him thirty seconds and I already prefer Lestrade,” Emili complained to John under her breath.

“We’re obviously looking at a suicide,” Dimmock announced.

John held off on making quick judgments. Emili and Sherlock had already made theirs, so it was up to John to be the voice of reason. “That _does_ seem like the only explanation of all the facts,” he cooperatively agreed.

“Wrong.” Sherlock sent John a wounded, almost betrayed glance, then firmly went on to explain exactly why the two were both so incorrect. “It’s one _possible_ explanation of _some_ of the facts. You’ve got a solution that you like, but you’re choosing to ignore anything you see that doesn’t comply with it.”

Dimmock put his hands down. “Like?” He prompted, not expecting there to be anything.

“Come on,” Sherlock sneered disappointedly. “You’re a detective and this student’s figured it out already!”

He pointed at Emili as he talked. She took her free hand and pointed at herself, too. “I have?” She questioned, thinking back to everything she’d said. What had possibly given Sherlock the impression that they were on the same page?

She joined the ranks of the bitter disappointments with one single look from Sherlock. She shrugged apologetically. More annoyed than interested now, Sherlock emphatically reminded, “The wound was on the right side of his head.”

Dimmock rolled his eyes. “And?”

“Van Coon was _lefthanded,_ ” Sherlock said very slowly. He picked up his own left arm and tried to point a finger gun at his right temple, first by going behind his head and then by holding his arm before his face and twisting his wrist. Neither way looked comfortable. “Requires quite a bit of contortion!” And, now that it was pointed out, Emili could see why it would look even weirder – Van Coon’s body was posed in a very normal position, not like he had dislocated his shoulder just to commit suicide. Still, that didn’t discount that he could’ve just chosen to use his other hand.

“Lefthanded?” Dimmock repeated skeptically.

Emili’s eyes went wide as she looked around again. She noticed how the glass was on the left side of a plate on the counter, how there were leftover condensation rings on the left corner of the coffee table, and how the chargers were plugged into the surge connector by the wall, even though it made them look more awkward.

“That’s why the things look odd,” she realized. “They’re on opposite sides.”

“Yes, clearly,” Sherlock confirmed dryly. “I’m amazed you didn’t notice, Inspector. All you have to do is look around this flat. Coffee table on the left-hand side, coffee mug handle pointing to the left. Power sockets: he habitually used the ones on the left. Pen and paper on the left-hand side of the phone because he picked it up with his right and took down messages with his left. Do you want me to go on?”

John’s grip on Emili grew tighter. She wiggled her hips a little bit to get him to notice without her having to say anything, and John quickly loosened his arm enough to drop it from her waist entirely. She still remained close, shaken from the discovery of the body.

“No,” John tersely interrupted, growing more embarrassed by the minute as Sherlock showed up the police. “I think you might have covered it.”

Missing the cue entirely, Sherlock went on, already on a roll. “Oh, I might as well, I’m almost at the bottom of the list.” John’s jaw tightened and his cheeks turned faintly pink. Emili watched their neighbor, intent to hear, but admittedly concerned that he would be forced into her apartment overnight after John locked him out of theirs. “There’s a knife on the breadboard with butter on the right side of the blade because he used it with his left. It’s highly unlikely that a lefthanded man would shoot himself in the right side of his head. Conclusion: Someone broke in here and murdered him.” In the silence that followed from Dimmock, the CSIs, and John and Emili, Sherlock allowed the briefest flash of a satisfied smirk. “ _Only_ explanation of _all_ the facts.”

Dimmock floundered for something to say. He was so clearly out of his depth that he grasped for anything to hold onto. “But the gun,” he stammered. “Why-?”

“He was waiting for the killer,” Sherlock finished the story grimly, rolling his shoulders back archly and stalking authoritatively past the inspector, seemingly absorbing all of the latter’s depleted confidence. “He’d been threatened.”

Dimmock’s face was confused for about five seconds. In that time, Sherlock crossed to the bedroom door, looked inside to check something, and leaned back out. Still self-assured and certain, he returned across the room to regroup with his co-conspirators.

Finally, the inspector realized his own crime scene was being overrun by a Holmes. “What?” He balked, starting to laugh condescendingly.

This was when John and Emili both decided to speak up. John looked genuinely contemplative as he considered everything once it had been explained, piece by piece, and although normally he discouraged Sherlock’s social approaches, he seemed just as surprised as Dimmock. John just handled it better.

“Today, at the bank,” he filled in. He piped up quietly, but it was unexpected to hear his voice, so everyone listened to it.

“A message was left at his workplace, and whatever it was made him panic.” Emili corroborated, nodding earnestly.

“He fired a shot when his attacker came in,” Sherlock established to account for the gunshot residue.

Dimmock started to storm forwards, but he halted after one step and raised his arms over his chest. “And the bullet?” He interrogated, raising his eyebrows and reluctantly listening.

Sherlock had a very prompt answer for that, too. “Went through the open window.”

The crossed arms fell. “Oh, come on!” The inspector scoffed, insulted that someone was trying to pull something over on him. “What are the chances of that?!”

If he had been trying to shoot someone who came through the window, then Emili guessed that those chances would actually have been decent. “I’d like to introduce you to the man who hired us at the bank and let you see what the odds are that someone managed to pull off the break-in they have,” she shared, growing a little more upset. If he knew who Sherlock was, then shouldn’t he know how good his word was? “Wait for the ballistics report – it’ll show that the bullet in his brain didn’t come from the same weapon he had by his hand.”

Dimmock looked at her sharply. He’d seen her before, but now he actually sized her up, checking out her clothes and making a miniscule face at the color of her hair before he reigned it in and realized from accounts of Sherlock who Emili must be.

“But if his door was locked from the outside,” he slowly questioned, sounding triumphant. He was still hoping that he could stump Sherlock to prove how silly the theory seemed. “How did the killer get in?”

“Good!” Sherlock’s eyes gleamed brightly. It was the only warning sign that Emili had before she screwed the top tightly on her water and prepared to follow him out suddenly. “You’re finally asking the right questions.”

With nothing more to say, and all the information that he wanted from the apartment, Sherlock passed and headed for the door. From one second to the next, he was in fluid motion. She envied him his grace, but was not delighted with his tendencies to take off without invitation or notice. Emili reached for John’s hand thoughtlessly and was pleased when he wrapped his fingers gently around her wrist and let her pull him towards the exit.

Emili highly doubted she would ever know for sure how Sherlock pinpointed Sebastian in a trendy restaurant at seven at night, down to the exact round table he was seated around with business associates, and she doubted that he would ever share his secret. When John had asked, the detective merely scoffed and didn’t explain. Emili privately thought he just wanted to keep some of his mystery to appear impressive.

This was the sort of restaurant where Emili would be embarrassed to eat – not because of its reputation, but because of herself. Without seeing the menu, she knew that she’d probably fumble over the pronunciation of half of the items. If she ordered anything less than filet mignon with a side of steamed asparagus, she feared that the server would deem her a classless buffoon. Not to mention that there was really no call to eat a meal that cost so much when there were perfectly good alternatives at much more economic prices.

Sherlock led the trio in a short, uncomfortable assembly line directly through the establishment, making a beeline for Sebastian and his associates. They all wore suits, they all had their napkins precisely folded, and they all had two different sizes of forks, a spoon, and a butter and steak knife each, which Emili thought was just ridiculous.

Sherlock’s old “friend” was just in his element. He laughed brightly, his face crinkling handsomely by his mouth and eyes, leaning back in his chair with a hand over his belly. “And he’s left, trying to cut his hair with a fork, which, of course, can never be done!”

The men he was entertaining (Em saw not one woman and tried not to read into that) guffawed. One of them stroked his goatee contemplatively, but the others were all laughing as jovially as was possible while still maintaining refined and polite public personas. One of them picked up the fork with the thinner and shorter prongs and stabbed into a crunchy bowl of greens, croutons, tomatoes, sliced ham, hard-boiled eggs, and cheddar cheese.

Sherlock stopped right at Sebastian’s side, closing in on his employer without batting an eye at the apparently hilarious story being told.

“It was a threat,” he said bluntly. John raked a hand through his short hair, looking around nervously. The man who’d been trying to stop them from barging through wrung his hands, looking faint. “That’s what the graffiti meant.”

Sebastian looked up at Sherlock and glanced around the table. The chuckles had stopped rather abruptly in light of such an announcement; in fact, several people looked alarmed and uneasy. Emili tried to smile at them.

Sebastian cleared his throat, smoothed the cloth napkin in his lap, and looked up to Sherlock, speaking in a low and consternating voice. “I’m kind of in a meeting,” he stated, glancing meaningfully at the table. “Can you make an appointment with my secretary?”

The pink-haired girl was offended. She realized that interrupting the dinner wasn’t chock full of manners, but Sebastian had come to them for help. If he had enough confidence in their abilities to entrust them with a break-in at Shad Sanderson, shouldn’t he trust that they had the discretion to wait when the circumstances permitted? Someone’s death was much more important than an evening out with the boys. If they had been talking business and incorporated the little mermaid’s cluelessness about silverware, Emili wasn’t sure how long their businesses were going to last.

She had trouble watching her mouth, and she knew that one day it was going to get her in trouble, but right then, she was brimming with spite. Someone had died, and Sebastian was rude to her brother, and all he cared about was what his friends thought of him. Van Coon deserved the respect of having his death investigated and treated courteously, not by being blown off and dismissed.

“Most of the time when you hire someone for their services, you don’t just blow them off when they come to you with your results.” Emili explained with faux patience to Sebastian, blinking her bright eyes flintily. “If it could wait for an appointment, we wouldn’t be interrupting your meeting.”

“One of your traders, someone who worked in your office, was killed this morning.” Sherlock laid the details on further. John winced again and pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, looking around the seated gentlemen and giving apologetic smiles.

Sebastian swallowed hard. “What?” He hissed.

“Van Coon,” John supplied, mindful of the setting. “The police are at his flat now.”

“Killed?” Sebastian repeated, hushed and shocked.

Sherlock cocked his head at the slow uptake. “Sorry to interfere with everyone’s digestion,” he informed the table with a sardonic pleasure. He looked back down to Sebastian, clearly annoyed at being dismissed so quickly. “Still want to make an appointment? Would, maybe, nine o’clock at Scotland Yard suit?”

Sebastian excused himself from the dinner table and shooed away the staff that was trying to escort the investigators off of the premises. He took Sherlock, John, and Emili towards the restrooms in the back corner of the restaurant and pushed open the door to the men’s room to go inside and talk with more privacy. John sighed, squared his shoulders, and followed after Sherlock, who breezed in behind Sebastian without pause.

Em looked at the sign on the door as it swung shut after the three males and bit her lip, then decided it was too inappropriate. She turned her back to the wall and slumped down, crossing her arms over her chest. The restrooms were closer to the kitchens. She could smell the delicious aroma of cooking seafood mixed with fresh-baked bread.

_Sometimes,_ she reflected, _it sucks to be the only girl._ Other than Mrs. Hudson and Molly, everyone Emili recurrently saw was a man. She excluded Anthea because, although she knew the woman kept tabs on her for Mycroft, she rarely approached the teen. She also didn’t count Donovan, because the sergeant got on her nerves so badly that Emili just tried to avoid her. Molly kind of made her uncomfortable, because whenever she was in a room with Sherlock, her crush was painfully obvious; she was rarely visiting Molly _without_ Sherlock, so Emili was almost always being subjected to that bystander’s perspective.

The men’s room’s door swung open partway and Sherlock stuck his upper body out, peering around until his eyes settled on Emili. “Have you gotten bored?” He asked disdainfully.

Emili dropped her arms. “I can’t follow you in there, Sherlock,” she pointed out exasperatedly. It was one thing to jimmy a simple doorknob, but she drew the line at waltzing into the public bathroom of the opposite gender.

Sherlock’s brows and mouth pulled down in confusion and annoyance. “Why not?” He asked.

She stared incredulously and pointed at the generic sign representing a man.

Sherlock followed her finger and blinked at the plaque. “Oh, of course,” he realized, bobbing his head briefly in acknowledgment. Then, without any further delay, he reached out, grabbed onto her left wrist, and gave her a hardy tug. Emili stumbled forwards after him while her brother pulled her into the men’s room after him.

The first thing that hit her was the smell. There was a cloying scent from soaps that was strong enough to overpower the smell of urinals, but while the scented soaps weren’t really offensive, there was just too much of it in the air. She wrinkled her nose and felt her face turning pink like her hair when she saw that there was a stranger using the facilities, as well.

“Sometimes I think you see signs and see them as what rules to break first!” She squeaked unhappily, pulling her wrist away from his hand and tucking her hands under her upper arms.

_“Sherlock,”_ John protested, looking towards Emili meaningfully.

Sherlock ignored him. “Where were we, Sebastian?”

The sound of a zipper caught Emili’s ears, and the russet-haired stranger walked widely around Emili and Sherlock to get to the sinks. His eyes lingered on Emili, just as uncomfortable with her being present as she was, and she steadfastly refused to look in his direction.

“Harrow, Oxford.” Sebastian rubbed antiseptic into his palms with rhythmic, repetitive motions of his thumbs and fingers. “Very bright guy. Worked in Asia for a while, so…”

“You gave him the Hong Kong accounts.” John understood. Emili tried to catch up, hearing that she missed a few lines before Sherlock noticed her absence.

Sebastian nodded once to the ex-army doctor. “He lost five mil in a single morning and made it all back a week later.” He chuckled humorlessly. His tone sounded flat and discordant. Emili shifted her weight, discomfited. Sebastian had struck her as a very sociable man, so hearing him sound detached was weird. “Nerves of steel, Eddie had,” he reminisced impersonally. “Would’ve done six years for us this November.”

“Who’d want to kill him?” John asked mildly, coughing quietly. It was obvious – to Em, at least – that John didn’t really want to ask, but felt that the importance outweighed how much it put him off. No one could ever say that John didn’t get things done.

The stranger left the bathrooms after tossing out the paper towels he’d used to dry his hands, and Emili felt some of the heat leaving her cheeks. Though she still wasn’t comfortable, it was less awkward once they were alone.

The banker shrugged in lieu of saying that he didn’t know. “We all make enemies.”

While Emili agreed that she had certainly experienced a lot of people with their enemies, she knew that her life wasn’t making many orthodox turns. “Most traders don’t end up murdered in their homes,” she hinted pointedly.

Sebastian looked at her like he was biting his tongue to refrain from saying something rude, but he relented and looked down to his shoes. “No,” he laughed dryly, shaking his head. “Not usually.” Something pinged, and the sound echoed. “Excuse me,” the Brit shifted and took out his phone from his pants pocket. He checked the screen. “It’s my chairman.”

He checked his messages while the three from 221 Baker Street stood around. Emili looked to her fingernails and started to pick at her cuticles. She had to admit that the men’s room was a big step up from dangling over the edge of a building, but she was still supremely uncomfortable in a way she hadn’t been at Roland-Kerr. John was trying to avoid looking at anyone for longer than he had to – the discussion setting was getting to him, too. Only Sherlock seemed not to care, and he was watching Sebastian read his phone raptly.

When Sebastian cleared his throat, more of his tone was in place. Emili was relieved to hear him sound more like himself. “The police have been onto him,” the banker stated, sounding agitated. He pushed his phone away and kept both arms down. “Apparently, they’re telling him it was a suicide.” He stared hard at Sherlock.

“They’re wrong, Sebastian. He was murdered.” Sherlock assured him without giving away any hint of uncertainty or deceit, but still, Sebastian didn’t buy it.

He turned his nose up at the detective. “Well, I’m afraid they don’t see it like that.”

Before she could change her mind, Em responded. “Of course they don’t!” She exclaimed in aggravation, throwing her arms up. John looked at her quickly in surprise. “They’re not going to tell you he was murdered if it was less than a sure thing, and half of our conclusion comes from the invasion of _your_ business, which you’ve completely neglected to inform the police of!”

She was ready to start pouring smoke out of her ears. It was stupid not to report a crime, especially one inside a bank. If a bank was penetrable, then the fiscal matters they handled were vulnerable. Scotland Yard should’ve been notified, even if charges weren’t going to be pressed. Sebastian didn’t have the experience or the authority of law enforcement agencies, and Emili was getting sick of his attitude and his treatment of Sherlock. He was buddy-buddy until he was embarrassed, then he was hostile until he wanted something. He needed to pick a demeanor and keep it, because the manipulation, no matter how see-through it was, was infuriating.

Sebastian took a step forwards. Just as quickly, John and Sherlock both moved. Each took a half-step closer to Emili, making it evident that Sebastian would have to get through them if he wanted to get any closer to the sixteen-year-old. Instead of pushing his physical boundaries, he glared at her between the two other men’s shoulders.

“I hired you to do a job.” He flatly scolded. Emili held her chin up indignantly. Sebastian did not have the right to scold her. “Don’t get sidetracked, Miss… Mr. Holmes,” he added significantly at Sherlock.

Sebastian left with a vigor in his gait. Em rotated on her heels to watch his back as he departed and she drew her hands up with an angry huff. She boxed at the air, imagining she was punching his shoulder before he could push open the door. John reached out across the space and pushed her left arm down, and her right obediently followed.

John narrowed his eyes. “Are _all_ bankers supposed to be heartless bastards?” He asked, frustration ringing in his question.

Emili kept her hands balled into fists. “I _really_ don’t like him,” she growled.

Whilst they aired their complaints, Sherlock stared off after Sebastian, seeing something that wasn’t there as he concentrated. Without another word, he whipped out his mobile and stalked out after the banker, taking an abrupt swerve in the other direction to head out of the restaurant.


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and Emili find connections between the crime scenes of their dead banker and a new victim.

After a long night of trying and failing to sleep dreamlessly, Emili decided to just stay awake after five AM, having flashes of dark cloth and red-splattered yellow walls in her dreams. She didn’t need a therapist to understand what was keeping her up.

At about nine, she slid her bare feet into bright green house slippers and covered her mouth in a wide yawn before padding out of her apartment. She drew her door closed on habit, but didn’t think to twist the door lock – she was just going downstairs for a few minutes. Like she knew it would, one of the stairs towards the top of the steps creaked underneath her weight as she walked down to 221B.

She knocked hard on the door. She knew John had plans – he’d sent her a text to tell her he wouldn’t be home - and Sherlock was very rarely asleep while there was sunlight illuminating the parlor. Her right hand ached with a cramp from holding a pen for the last hour, so she worked her thumb hard into the muscles and tendons in her palm.

No one came to the door, and no one said anything. All things considered, Emili had probably already stumbled upon the most unpleasant sights she could see in a man’s apartment when she opened Sherlock’s freezer or his half of the cupboards, so she tried the door; unlocked. She pushed it open and walked inside, looking around curiously.

Sherlock was sitting in front of his laptop at the kitchen table, which was, for once, free of any sort of science equipment. Emili’s stomach growled quietly. She crossed to the sofa and collapsed down in the corner, kicking off her slippers and curling up into a small little mass of pink and green.

“I said,” Sherlock said firmly, “Could you pass me a pen?”

Emili startled. “When did you say that?” She asked in confusion.

Sherlock didn’t look away from his computer. Sometimes Emili thought it was impossible to startle him, and she envied him his calm composure. “To John, about an hour ago.”

Em tangled a hand in her long, untied hair as she pulled it away from her face. “John had an appointment at seven this morning to meet with the manager of a health clinic,” she relayed, shocked that Sherlock hadn’t known. How did the man who seemed to know everything completely miss that his roommate wasn’t even in the building? “Did you really not notice he wasn’t here?”

“His lack of correct deductions seems to have very little difference whether he is or isn’t, so it’s no surprise that his absence left little impact.” Her brother promptly answered.

The girl blinked, frowned, and sighed, dropping her hands into her lap. “Okay,” she said, processing and trying to come up with a response. “Wow. Future reference, that’s rude.”

_Rude_ was not the first word that came to her mind, but throwing insults wouldn’t get her anywhere. To be honest, she wasn’t sure that pointing out unacceptable behaviors was going to get her anywhere, either, but Emili wanted to believe that, even if it was for purely selfish reasons, Sherlock preferred to not offend his friends. He got upset when no one was willing to indulge him, so it stood to reason that he’d like it if they weren’t pissed at him most of the time.

Instead of replying to her comment, or even appearing vaguely apologetic towards the man that wasn’t there, Sherlock shifted gears and started questioning after a completely unrelated subject. “How’s your maths doing?” He enquired.

She cocked her head. “How’d you know?” She asked his back plainly, reluctantly admitting that she was still impressed and intrigued by his abilities.

Sherlock clicked his tongue like it was obvious. “Ink stains on your hand. They weren’t there last night and the only class you use a pen for is maths.” Emili picked up her hands and turned them over. There were marks from the nub knocking against the side of her index finger. “Are you finished?’

She thought back to her open notebook and the online module. Logarithms weren’t going to solve themselves, but aside from being a little bit time consuming, she understood the concept. “I can be,” she replied slowly. She could always come back to them later. She still liked how free her schedule got to be with the online education.

“Excellent.” Sherlock sat back in the chair, his spine still straight, and turned the computer slightly to his right. “Come look at this.”

It occurred to the teenager that Sherlock didn’t seem as if he had expected any other answer, and so she briefly questioned whether or not encouraging his apparent belief that she had no higher priorities was a good call on her part. She decided that if it got to that point, she could always put her foot down. In the meantime, what high schooler didn’t put off their math homework?

After sighing with effort and getting up under protest, she approached the table to see what was so important. When she got closer, Emili could see that it was John’s laptop again, not Sherlock’s. _So much for password protection._ The laptop was opened to an internet article from a London news bulletin. Sherlock folded his hands under his chin and closed his eyes in thought. Sending him a cynical glance, Emili bent down by his shoulder and read.

_Ghostly Killer Leaves a Mystery for Police_ was the bolded headline. Underneath it was a small profile photo of a slowly but surely balding man in a vest with a crooked smile and a faraway look in his eyes. _An intruder who can walk through walls murdered a man in his London apartment last night. Brian Lukis, forty-one, a freelance journalist from Earl’s Court, was found shot in his fourth-floor flat, but all his doors and windows were locked and there were no apparent signs of a break-in._

The article went on to directly quote one of the investigators on the scene, but Emili skimmed over that and stood up straight again. She absentmindedly put a hand on the back of Sherlock’s chair, gears in her brain speeding up with an engaging challenge. Putting the image of Van Coon’s corpse out of her mind, she pictured the scene again: locked doors, no forced entry, death by gunshot wound.

“It’s the MO,” she stated, hesitant to immediately believe that they were related. It seemed like an awful coincidence, but when she stopped to think about it, London was a large city, and there were plenty of other reasons why there might not have been forced entry. It could’ve been any number of situations that went wrong. Maybe, like she had told John, the killer had twisted locks on their way out, like she had done to keep Liza out of her bedroom. And there were plenty of illicit ways to get ahold of firearms, and no one could say that they weren’t efficient weapons.

“Happened last night.” Sherlock’s eyes snapped open. He reached for the computer and gently pushed the screen down. “Journalist shot dead in his flat, doors locked, windows bolted from the inside, exactly the same as Van Coon. He’s killed another one.”

One thing Emili knew about Sherlock was that, although he could be a little obsessive, he was also empirical to a fault. He would argue with police to his last breath, but only if they were incorrect. She thought of a way to voice her concerns over whether or not the murders were actually related in a way that wouldn’t send him on an offensive tirade about her intellect or memory.

“Don’t we have to find that message somewhere Lukis was to be sure?” She suggested thoughtfully.

The yellow spray paint was what had tied the crime scenes at Tower 42 and in the apartment together. The reason Van Coon had died had to do with the symbol. If the same killer had taken the journalist’s life, then he was either a spree killer or they were murdered for the same reason. The scenes were too organized and methodical to be part of a spree, which left only the graffiti to connect the pieces.

The police had already found the crime scene in Lukis’ apartment, so there was no chance of sneaking in unnoticed until it was cleared out and abandoned by law enforcement. If Sherlock hoped to get any trace evidence, they couldn’t afford to wait that long. Emili was more concerned with losing time, because if someone had killed twice already, the only thing really standing between them and a third body was how quickly someone did something to stop it.

Without time to waste or a badge to flash, they had to resort to the only person they knew was available who had the authority to get them into the crime scene. Emili still hopefully looked around, seeking out Lestrade with her eyes, but she couldn’t find the older detective inspector between the front entrance and Dimmock’s desk.

Dimmock, unlike Lestrade, did not have his own office. He sat at a public desk near other inspectors’, a cup of something hot on a folded paper towel by his computer keyboard. He stalked back to his desk with two independent investigators chasing him step for step.

Sherlock brandished a physical copy of the journal article from a newspaper stand. “Brian Lukis, freelance journalist murdered in his flat, doors locked from the inside,” he summarized roughly.

The brunet sighed as he turned around and sank down onto the padding of his office chair and crossed his right leg over his left. Adamantly, he refused to look at Sherlock or the paper being held out to him. Dimmock woke up his computer and held his hands over the keys, fingers twitching the move.

“Even _you_ can’t just say it’s coincidence,” Emili pushed for a reaction, increasingly frustrated with Scotland Yard. Weren’t they obligated to follow all possible leads? It was public safety at risk! “It’s the exact same.”

Dimmock swallowed and blinked, yet his eyes remained stubbornly glued to his computer. After a second, he paused, opened his mouth, and licked his slightly-parted lips in preparation to say something.

Sherlock didn’t give him the chance. “Inspector, do you seriously believe that Eddie Van Coon was just another city suicide? You _have_ seen the ballistics report, I suppose?” He slapped the newspaper on top of Dimmock’s hands and dropped it over the man’s fingers. He was forced to look at the headline as he moved it out of the way.

“Mm-hmm,” the detective confirmed unhappily, his shoulders stiff.

Em saw their persistence wearing away at Dimmock’s refusal to acknowledge them and knew that if they kept at it, he would crack. She put her hands down by his coffee (she was secretly delighted to have met another person who didn’t first go to tea) and leaned over onto his desk invasively.

“And the shot that killed him,” Sherlock coached, rolling his eyes in annoyance as he had to walk Dimmock through it. “Was it fired from his own gun?”

With a very sour expression, Dimmock crossed his arms and tucked his hands underneath his upper arms. He bit on his tongue while glaring mutinously up at the black-haired man, but shifted his shoulders gradually and looked away to mutter, “No.”

“No,” Sherlock repeated, marginally appeased. “So this investigation might move a bit quicker if you were to take my word as gospel.”

Her head snapped up to stare at Sherlock, her mouth parted in shock and disbelief. Dimmock was similarly taken aback by the callousness and arrogance of the statement, and for a second, both of them just looked up at Sherlock as if he had lost his freaking mind.

“Wow,” Emili eventually said, her face one of distaste. “That escalated…” she sent another warning, long look at her brother. He didn’t seem at all repentant, just questioning as to why she was objecting to _him_. She turned her stare back to Dimmock and splayed her fingers on the desktop. “Just like the body count will continue to do if you don’t start listening!” She urged. “There’s a _reason_ Lestrade told you about us. It’s because we’re worth paying attention to.”

Her voice had gentled. Emili was trying to appeal to something other than hard logic, because Dimmock was proving to be the kind of man who didn’t want to admit that he was wrong. She thought that maybe pointing out they had the confidence of a senior DI might win them a little more trust – maybe even some recognition, because a man more experienced than Dimmock wouldn’t put stock repeatedly in the words of lunatics.

Sherlock ruined it, of course, and Emili wasn’t sure why she hadn’t predicted he would. “And I’ve just handed you a murder enquiry,” he aggressively stated, pointing at the newspaper as his proof. “Five minutes in this man’s flat.”

Not for the first time, Emili wondered at how nice it was to have police escorts. All it took was for Dimmock to show his badge to confirm that he was who he said he was, and Sherlock and Emili were permitted up into Brian Lukis’ apartment. Sherlock snapped on pale blue latex gloves to keep his fingerprints off of things (Emili would just as soon not touch a ton, but was given a pair anyway by a nice-looking man with freckles and a smile who manned the CSI equipment).

Dimmock pushed the master key into the keyhole of the door, twisted it around to the left, and took it out again before opening up the apartment. Sherlock brushed past, knocking the door open wider with his shoulder on his way. Dimmock only seemed a little surprised, and Emili felt a little ditched. She pranced after Sherlock with a lighthearted skip in her step, a forced bounce. She tried not to think too hard about how there had been a body in the apartment some hours ago.

“What are we looking for?” Dimmock questioned as he pulled the door shut to preserve the scene, slipping the key surreptitiously into the pocket on the inside of his grey blazer.

Lukis’ apartment was a stark contrast to Van Coon’s. The trader’s had been immaculate, almost unlived in, with the exception of his kitchen and his liquor collection. Lukis’ furniture looked like he’d never heard of a vacuum, and had no sort of organization. Although it was on the pricier side of London housing, there was a lingering scent that reminded Em of burned eggs and old lunch meat. She couldn’t see the coffee table for all of the miscellaneous junk on it, ranging from opened mail to empty beer and Aquafina bottles.

A skylight on the right side of the apartment looked in at the living room. A grey suede couch had a black laptop slid towards the back of the cushions, a pair of socks near it for some reason that escaped the American, and various travel magazines. One cushion was clear, and it was just large enough for an adult to sit. As she moved further into the apartment, Dimmock just a few feet behind her, her nose also caught the mildew-y draft coming from behind closed closet doors. She pinched her nose shut and veered towards the desk shoved into a corner, table lamp still turned on above it.

“Anything that could connect this crime scene to Van Coon’s apartment.” Emili answered after a beat, having waited for Sherlock to give some input. When he failed, she resolved to replying to the questions. Sherlock’s back was to them as he studied the door wide open to the bedroom and gradually stalked inside. Her stomach turned and she promised herself she would stay out of there. “Inconsistencies in the suicide theory that you seem to enjoy…” She caught herself giving Dimmock a fish-eyed glare. “God, what _is_ it with Scotland Yard passing murders off as suicide?”

Emili believed Lestrade was a more than decent detective, and she wished that more people had his willingness to be proven wrong and to adapt to facts. She also wished that more of the officers had his patience with her and politeness towards John. Even so, she couldn’t just forget that he had been the one to decide that Jeff Hope’s murders were actually voluntary suicides, and Emili had almost lost her life while trying to stop the rampant serial killer.

Part of her knew it was her fault that her life had been in danger to begin with. She’d gotten into a cab with a stranger, only knowing that he was a killer, because she wanted to play hero. She had wanted to save someone’s life, not realizing that she was the next target. She was incredibly lucky that Sherlock and John had thought to trace the fourth victim’s phone and saved her life. Sometimes she still wondered what might have gone differently if the police had been more prepared to believe that there was a real threat other than Sherlock’s possible drug habits.

While she stretched out her gloves to pull up over her hands, Dimmock put his hands on his hips and stood by her, making sure she didn’t do anything she shouldn’t. “What is it with _you_ and thinking you’re better than the police?” He returned, having an easier time finding his voice than he had at the last crime scene. Emili sighed and rolled her eyes as she touched slippery magazine covers through latex, moving them away so she could pick up the datebook underneath. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

She flipped the book open, but accidentally to the wrong month. “Online school,” she retorted quickly, turning the pages. “I choose my own hours, which means you can’t get rid of me that easily.”

“Got rid of the short one,” Dimmock commented, looking around with vague interest as if only just then realizing John wasn’t accompanying them.

“Dr. Watson is working,” she said curtly, closing the datebook. Unless root canals or dinner with his mother were code for something else, she doubted there was much they couldn’t get from his boss. Most of his dates were publications and due dates for rough and final drafts of articles.

Just by looking around, Emili could take a pretty good guess at the kind of lifestyle he lived. With his journalism, he made enough to keep his nice place, but it was tiresome work that he had trouble focusing on. The messy apartment, the scattered magazines and books, the computer right where he might have sat – it was like he’d sit or pace for hours trying to come up with content that someone would be willing to pay him for publishing rights to. She almost felt bad. She couldn’t imagine having her writing assignments critiqued as harshly as journals or newspapers would’ve critiqued Lukis’.

Unexpectedly, Sherlock’s lower voice called both of them for attention. “Em, come here,” he instructed.

The teen and the detective both twisted to look and see. Sherlock had pulled open the closet doors, exposing an electric dryer and a washer that had one of the dials broken off. A pair of pliers was on the top, used to twist the thin prong to set the timer. On top of the dryer was a brown briefcase, opened up to show messy, rumpled clothes. Sherlock was kneeling before the dryer with interest, his arms in front of him.

She lowered herself into a curious crouch at Sherlock’s left side. He held his hands towards her, cradling a black paper flower in his palms. A little less than half of the petals were abused and bent out of shape, like they’d been crushed by a suitcase or the closed closet doors. The shadow from the third person fell partially over the pathetic-looking flower when Dimmock leaned over between them.

“A piece exactly like this was found with Van Coon,” Emili murmured softly to Sherlock, still not sure that she wanted Dimmock to know. If Sherlock had kept the origami for his own observation, then she didn’t want him to get in trouble. “Remember?”

Sherlock looked at her like she asked something incredibly stupid. She sighed and nodded and resisted the twitching urge in her hand to do something rude with her fingers.

“It’s origami,” Dimmock stated, disappointed. “I’m sure lots of people make those.”

Emili picked herself up from the floor, rising to her feet with her hands on her knees. Her hair swung forwards, tickling her cheeks, and she had to consciously stop herself from getting hair on her gloves from the impulse to fix it. “It’s not just origami!” She objected. “It’s a serial killer’s signature.” Sherlock stood, too, placing the black flower on the top of a shirt that was half-folded and half-balled up. At least now Emili knew where the icky smell was coming from – the dirty laundry. “Which you would _know_ ,” she stressed, “If you knew how to rule something as murder!”

Sherlock flew across the room. “Four floors up,” he interrupted them. Emili ceased picking on Dimmock, biting the inside of her cheek. “That’s why they think they’re safe.” The way he was starting to pick up speed told Emili that he wasn’t speaking to _them_ , but to himself. She still gestured with her hand for Dimmock to listen. She often got more out of his rambling than she did out of his hasty and impatient direct communication. “Put a chain across the door and bolt it shut, and they think they’re impregnable.” He stopped cold in the middle of the living room, staring with his head tilted back at the skylight. “They don’t reckon for one second that there’s another way in.”

_Hold on,_ Emili almost protested, _are you implying that the climber scaled the building and came through that little rectangle?_ The skylight was large enough for a small adult to slide through – definitely herself, possibly John, definitely _not_ Lestrade - but it was at such a steep angle that she doubted anyone would be dumb enough to try.

Before she could ask, Dimmock unfolded his arms, turning around and shuffling on his feet. “I don’t understand,” he objected, his eyebrows furrowing and his jaw tightening.

Sherlock’s voice hardened. “You’re dealing with a killer who can climb.” He ripped the desk chair away from the desk, and even though there were pads at the ends of the feet to help it move, he ripped it over so hard that it bounced on the carpet for a second before he put his weight on it, stepping up to stand by the wall under the skylight.

Her brother pressed hard on the window latch. It didn’t really have a safety mechanism, but she heard something make a small squeak before it was finally forcibly unlocked. Then, with a careful press against the lower side of the panel, Sherlock pushed it partway open, the London street noise magnifying and a small rush of cool, crisp air wafting in. His dark hair ruffled.

“What are you doing?” Dimmock questioned again, not following along. He looked more cross the longer he spent in confusion, and as Emili could see his patience waning, she could also see the tightness in his face that suggested he was about to demand that they leave the crime scene, even though they had probably had only four of the promised five minutes.

Sherlock ran his hands along the edge of the window, feeling at the outside of the windowpane for an indication that it could be opened from the side of the building. “He clings to the walls like an insect,” he called down to Emili. His right hand stopped moving as he found something. Em guessed it was a lock or latch. “That’s how he got in.”

That was a nice theory, but even Emili doubted him. It was an awful lot of climbing, and at a big risk. Falling from this height, not to mention the height of Tower 42’s Shad Sanderson office, could pulverize a person. She was healthily cynical, but didn’t appreciate that Dimmock wasn’t really considering the possibility. She was a sixteen-year-old, in no way obligated to believe what she was told. Dimmock was an adult in the law enforcement service, and was therefore legally bound to heed due diligence statutes, which included pursuing leads, even if they seemed unorthodox.

“What?!” Dimmock declared louder, shaking his head incredulously.

Emili sent him an annoyed glare. “Are you always this confused?” It was the third time he had said something indicating that he wasn’t following along in the last sixty seconds.

Sherlock drew his hands back inside and pulled the window shut gently. When the seal reconnected, the noise from outside muffled itself as if she had put on headphones, and it made a quiet, subtle _thunk_ noise. “He climbed up the side of the walls, ran along the roof, and dropped in through this skylight.”

“You’re not serious!” Dimmock objected, scowling distastefully. He put his hands on his hips sassily and sneered. “Like _Spiderman?_ ”

Emili said, “That would be ridiculous.” For just a second, the detective looked relieved that someone was being sensible, until she added musingly, “More like Jessica Jones.”

Sherlock hopped off of the chair and, impressively, hit the floor walking. “He scaled six floors of a Docklands apartment building and jumped the balcony to kill Van Coon.”

Dimmock’s mouth moved, but no sound came out until he threw his hands down and yelled at Sherlock’s back, “Hold on-!”

“And, of course, that’s how he got into the bank. He ran along the window ledge and onto the terrace.” Sherlock stopped beside the washer and dryer again, and picked up a new-looking book from the suitcase. He turned it over, looked at the back for a few seconds, and then dropped it back onto the messily packed laundry. “We have to find out what connects these two men.”

Sherlock reached for his wrists and started stripping off his gloves, ripping them off of his hands, balling them up, and tossing them into the open trashcan beside the door. He pulled open the apartment door and left it wide open when he left, taking a sharp turn.

Emili sighed. _Does he assume I’ll follow, or does he forget I’m supposed to be with him? … Which is less insulting?_

Dimmock pushed his hands into his pockets, rocking on his feet, bewildered. “How does he _do_ that?” He asked, scuffing a shoe on the patch of tile he stood on. The detective sounded both infuriated and grudgingly awed.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Emili agreed thoughtfully. Sherlock and Mycroft were hands-down the sharpest people she had ever met, and she still wasn’t sure how they handled their intellect without going insane. She couldn’t imagine being overwhelmed with as much information as they processed at any given time. Then again, that sort of explained why Sherlock had had a drug issue. “Maybe all of us would be more like that if we weren’t so focused on the superficial, and the trivial, and _Keeping Up with the Kardashians._ ” Emili still didn’t know if Sherlock had excellent focus or an extreme attention deficit, but the world might be a safer and less confusing place if everyone had his talents.

She didn’t realize she had started to zone out while thinking until Dimmock touched her shoulder, giving her a gentle shove on her upper arm for her attention. “Keeping up with who?” He asked curiously, his tone impatient like he’d asked more than once.

Aside from the immediate disbelief that he had had to ask, Emili stared at him, wide-eyed, for a very long moment. She finally answered, “Do yourself a favor and protect yourself; don’t ever Google what I just said.”

There were three levels in a simple cult hierarchy, Emili reflected as she trailed along behind Sherlock, dragging her eyes over the spines of books in the Kensington Municipal Library. The highest level was the leader. There was typically only one leader at any given time in a cult. Said leader was charismatic, sympathetic, and attractive more often than not, but all of those traits tended to hide sociopathic tendencies. Just underneath the leader was a small swarm of ‘true believers.’ The true believers would hail the leader’s preaching as their truths, and would place their cult’s values above any of their own personal needs. The believers scared Emili the most, honestly – the leader was just one person, but an entire group of obsessive worshipers had power. Just ask the KKK, or Al-Qaeda, or the Nazis, or any other organization that had die-hard members in its uppermost ranks. Finally, there were the followers. Most of the people were followers, dedicated to the cause in that it was a guiding force in their life, but in general, followers would prioritize themselves and their other important values before their cult’s demands when it really came down to it – like how a Christian mother might take her children to church weekly, but would cease doing so if the church became a dangerous place.

It might have bothered her that she knew so much about cult structures if it wasn’t for how she regularly employed such information in her daily life. No, what bothered her was that she was beginning to feel like one of the followers, traipsing after her leader like she was one of the Lost Boys in Neverland. Sherlock had an irritating habit of not telling her everything unless she put her foot down and made him tell her or risk losing his company, which usually made him surly and sulky for hours afterward.

He hadn’t spoken to her for almost ten minutes, but Emili thought it was probably worth it. Now she knew why they were at the library. Although there hadn’t been the time for Lukis to unpack his belongings since returning from his journalism-related trip abroad, the book on the top layer of his suitcase had been borrowed from the facility about twenty-four hours ago, if the timeline was right. Like Emili had suggested, they were looking for more proof of a connection between Van Coon and Lukis. So far, the black origami seemed damning, but Sherlock wanted to see if there were any extra clues to be found by retracing Lukis’ steps. Why had he been distracted from unpacking if he had had the time to run non-pressing errands to collect reading books?

The fictional books were Emili’s favorite, because she liked the organizational system the best. The non-fiction section used the Dewey Decimal System, which she wasn’t as familiar with, and it left her looking at the ISBN numbers on the sides of books, trying to get closer and closer to the number that Sherlock had recited without pause from memory.

She got a digit closer and slowed down. They were only off by a few now, and their slot would be coming up. Sherlock covered the right side of the shelves while Emili surveyed the left side, pursing her lips thoughtfully. “It’s weird doing this without John,” she remarked offhandedly. The doctor had become sort of a safety blanket for Em in the last several months. Although she would go to the Holmeses in a second if she thought she was in real trouble, John felt more supportive and present than anyone else. She didn’t want to bother him by being clingy, but she was sure that Sherlock – and likely Mycroft – had both been able to discern it.

Sherlock scoffed quietly while scanning the titles, ISBN codes, and placements. “We can’t just stand idly by and wait for his return.”

“I know,” Emili hurriedly assured, a little bit offended. Surely Sherlock would’ve realized by now that she wasn’t the kind of girl who sat around waiting – for _anyone_. “I just…” She stopped herself, not knowing how to explain it to a man who was notorious for neglecting emotional connections. She didn’t know how to tell Sherlock that John made her feel safe in a way that Sherlock usually didn’t, especially since she knew very well that Sherlock was more than capable of physically fighting. Em worried that she was getting a little too attached to the army doctor. “Never mind,” she muttered, shaking her head.

Sherlock did exactly that. “The date stamped on the book is the same day that he died.”

“So he was here yesterday.” Emili slowed to a stop as she saw the ISBN numbers come incredibly close to the one she was looking for. “Hey, maybe they haven’t reordered their check-ins yet.” It looked like it, going by how many books were empty from the shelves and how many were tilted or upside down after being put back by visitors who had ultimately decided against loaning them out.

Sherlock pulled out books on the other side of the shelves. Even with her back turned, Emili could hear the thud as some of them fell down without the pressure of their neighboring stories. She found the number just one off from hers, and peered into the dark slot. She could just barely see a difference in color, but didn’t know if it was shadows or not. It was right at eye-level, so she lifted her hands a little higher than she was used to in a library, pulling the books on either side out of the cubbyhole.

As more light streamed into the space, she could more clearly see the color. It was definitely not shadows. A streak of yellow and a curving slide of the same color became visible. She felt her heart rate picking up and glanced briefly over her shoulder. It was creepy and nerve-wracking, like in a spy movie. She set both of those books down flat on the shelf beneath and took out more, rapidly uncovering the yellow paint that had hidden behind them. She put down the last of the books she’d removed and took a step back. It was exactly like the sign at Shad Sanderson.

“I found it!” She called to Sherlock, her body stilling like stone as she stared.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mycroft comes through for Emili when she really needs him.

Sherlock had been thrilled to find the graffiti – or, at least, whatever passed as thrilled for him – and within an hour of their return home, he had printed out photos taken with his phone and taped them up to the mantelpiece above the fireplace. Emili was tucked into the couch with her laptop, reviewing every online article she had found that was authored by the latest victim, searching for anything that might indicate an involvement in something dangerous enough to get him killed. The detective was curled into his armchair, staring straight forward at the printed photographs. Emili wasn't entirely sure he was even blinking.

A door closing suddenly made Emili jump. Sherlock made no sign of hearing such a thing. Seconds later, footsteps started up the stairs quickly, accompanied by a man's voice shouting up towards the apartment. "Sherlock! Sherlock, you won't guess what I found when I left the surgery." Then, quieter, he added, "Well, maybe you will," as he recalled the man's stunning powers of being able to know everything before anyone else. "Is Em here?" The door to 221B was pushed open by John, who had a bag of groceries around his wrist and a newspaper held up to his face.

John was so absorbed with the paper that he didn't, at first, notice the positions of everyone in the flat. Emili wasn't sure he realized that she was actually there, because the newspaper was between his eyes and her. Either way, John was buzzing with excitement and alarm.

"The killer who walks through walls? He hit again last night! He-"

Just as he took the paper away from his face, John saw Emili, seated at the couch, and Sherlock, staring at the fireplace. The blogger took in the photographs being stared at, the identical yellow shapes, and Emili's slightly guilty expression, and then put the clues together.

"… You already found out, haven't you?" He sighed, his face coloring a little bit in embarrassment. He put the newspaper down with a sigh, the corners of the papers crumpling against his thighs.

* * *

The teen tried not to notice how pleased she was to have John back within the investigative committee as Sherlock "debriefed" them on their findings, pacing across the living room like a pissed off caged feline. John nursed a hot cup of grey tea that still sported gentle wisps of pale steam. Emili hugged her laptop to her abdomen while her brother ranted. Night was perilously close to falling. From the window out to the street, only the barest hints of colored lights were twinkling through the blinds, casting dancing shadows of soft golds and dark pinks on the glass and the kitchen table.

Emili felt the tiredness beginning to creep up on her. They had found a new victim and ascertained that there was a connection in the last day, which frustrated her, as it wasn't too much progress. Belying her determination to uncover the secrets of the case, her jaw stretched in a stressed yawn, forcibly reminding her that her sleep the night before had been interrupted and punctuated with discomfort and startles. Much as she hated to admit it, she wouldn't be able to keep her eyes open for much longer.

Their blogger looked to be in a similar plight. The tea in his hands was drifting steam up to his face, which kept encouraging him to let his eyes slide shut drowsily. Then, with the next pass that Sherlock made by the chair, the motion and the sound jolted John awake again, but only for a few seconds before his drink lulled him off again.

Emili tried to pay attention, but the words glided past like a lullaby more than a discussion. "The killer goes to the bank," Sherlock agitatedly summarized, "Leaving a threatening cipher for Van Coon; Van Coon panics, returns to his apartment, locks himself in, and, hours later, he dies."

The mental image of the bloody and disfigured face made Emili shift, waking her enough to participate. "Then he finds Lukis at the library. He adds the cipher to the shelf where he knows it will be seen, and Lukis runs home."

Sherlock stopped pacing, standing before the fireplace, his eyes flitting from image to image. Added to the collection was a cut-out of the article John found on the journalist's death. "Late that night, he dies, too."

There was something sick about the men being murdered after taking to their homes for safety. Someone's home was the place where they had the right to live peacefully, not to have their lives taken. Emili wondered what might have happened if, instead of running to sanctuary, they had stayed with someone else. What if Van Coon had put in overtime instead of taking off early? What if Lukis had gone to the police station? Was it possible they'd have survived? Had succumbing to their flight instinct been what led to their demise? A chill swept over the girl, not entirely because of the temperature.

John raised sleepy eyes to his roommate. "Why did they die, Sherlock?" He questioned plaintively, his voice confused and sorrowful.

Sherlock brushed his fingertips over the edge of a photograph from the library. "Only the cipher can tell us."

When Emili fell asleep moments later, it was with the ideas of ciphers and hidden messages fresh in her mind. She dreamed of using a computer to break the code, like the Allies had done about the Germans' Enigma system, or hacking through layers and layers of binary. None of these dreams made her feel any safer, as at several times, she looked into the screens of her computers and saw the reflection of a shining gun's barrel at the back of her head.

* * *

Emili was woken up kindly by a combination of John and the smell of spiced eggs and brewing tea wafting from the kitchen of 221B. The doctor shooed her upstairs after breakfast, where she had barely half an hour to shower, dress, and brush her teeth and hair before Sherlock was impatiently rapping on her door, demanding that she hurry. _Time is of the essence,_ she thought irritably, spitting toothpaste out into the sink. _So is hygiene, you energetic freak. It's seven AM. Go back to bed and pretend to be human._

After being dragged out the door by her wrist and carted in a taxi all the way to Trafalgar Square, she felt much more alert. She'd been to Trafalgar Square, of course – it was one of the first places she'd gone after Mycroft turned her loose on the city. However, she had lacked the motivation to enter the National Gallery. It was a large, impressive building, the front of which reminded her of an elongated version of the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC. The British flag flew high above the third story, and on each side of the entrance, huge red banners were draped down from the columned entryway and advertised their new exhibit.

She stayed firmly between John and Sherlock to avoid getting separated. It was a bright, beautiful morning on a weekend, so there were more than a few tourists making their way through Upper London to see all the sights. As such, the square was bustling. Emili wasn't looking forward to entering the National Gallery, positive that it would be jam-packed.

Sherlock spoke at his normal volume. Luckily, it wasn't as loud as an open and busy place could have been, but he only just drowned out a squealing six-year-old who didn't want to pose for the photo the parents wanted to take.

"The world runs on codes and ciphers, John. From the million-pound security system at the bank, to the PIN machine you took exception to, cryptography inhabits our every waking moment."

Emili thought back to her unsettling dreamscape and agreed. The binary code example had made a point. Electronics and technology were everywhere, and without the codes that ran them, the applications they used on a daily basis were rendered useless.

"Yes, okay," John agreed too quickly. "But-"

"But it's all computer-generated," Sherlock continued, not acknowledging that the veteran had something else on his mind that he wanted to ask. John scowled. "Electronic codes, electronic ciphering methods – this is different. It's an ancient device. Modern code-breaking methods won't unravel it."

If Emili had thought they could, she would have already taken it to Anthea or to Mycroft. People were dying over it; her independence wasn't as important as their help. "That part we get," she promised. Sherlock liked being told when he was right. She took the opportunity to hurriedly ask while he was letting her agree with him. "Where are we going? Who's going to help in the National Gallery?"

Sherlock waited for a beat. Emili narrowed her eyes.

"There's someone I know," he decided to disclose, looking straight ahead at the steps leading to the grand entry. "I need to ask some advice."

Her brother was the most prideful person Emili had ever met. Hearing him admit that he needed help just didn't happen. Her jaw dropped. No wonder he'd been ignoring the question. He wouldn't have wanted to answer it.

"What?!" John exclaimed, a silly grin growing on his face.

He and Emili exchanged a delighted look, taking far more pleasure in Sherlock's admittance than they probably should've. "Can you repeat that?" Em requested innocently, turning her head back to her left to look up at Sherlock hopefully. "I couldn't hear."

He huffed. "You heard me perfectly," he stated accusatorily. "I'm not saying it again."

John tilted his head back to smile at the sky. " _You_ need advice!"

"On _painting,_ yes," Sherlock specified, shooting John a dirty glare. No one would've expected Sherlock to be an expert on art, but at the same time, Emili had never really considered that he wouldn't be an expert on anything. The only reason he got away with his arrogance and pride was because he was scarcely incorrect. "I need to talk to an expert."

The girl decided it had definitely been worth waking up. To make it even better, the National Gallery would have air conditioning – she could feel her hair sticking to the back of her neck already, and it made her feel itchy and hot. She and John both continued to follow Sherlock's lead, both of them giggling, just to meet the person who knew more than Sherlock about something, by his own admission.

When they reached the front steps, Sherlock took a sudden left. John and Emili both looked after him, puzzled. They were supposed to be going inside, right? Sherlock didn't slow down and didn't look back, so Emili sagged her shoulders and reluctantly pursued. Air conditioning or not, she still wanted to witness Sherlock, of all people, asking for someone else's expertise.

The self-proclaimed consulting detective walked all the way to the side of the building. It was a longer trek than it looked – the National Gallery was enormous. He took a right at the very end, turning down the side of the building and away from tourists and sightseers. A breeze was closer to the ground, and in the shadows from the building, Emili and John both cooled down significantly. Happier, they followed blindly while Sherlock led them down the length of the building, then took another turn to walk behind the back alley of the museum.

She heard the noise before she saw its source. A street artist was several meters down the back of the building, shaking a spray paint can. The pressurizing ball inside rattled obnoxiously in a can with a coppery orange top. John took hold of Emili's sleeve and dragged her a few paces away from where they had stopped, and when the guy uncapped the can and started to use it, she saw the fumes and thin mists of paint blow downwind towards where they'd been standing.

Sherlock watched impassively. John looked very noticeably upset by the turn of events, and he surveyed the vandalism with a hardly-contained grimace. The guy was using the metallic orange to tag his street name, Raz, in all-capital letters underneath the offensive depiction of a beat cop in uniform. He looked generic, dark-haired and white-skinned, late twenties to late thirties (it was hard to tell with the cartoony mockery). His irises were red and his nose was replaced with a fleshy pink pig's snout, and brandished in his hands was an elaborately-stenciled automatic rifle. Emili knew for a fact that beat cops did not, in fact, have crimson eyes, pig noses, or automatic rifles.

Raz (which was probably not his actual name) wore oversized cargo pants that were dangerously close to falling off of his skinny hips, combat boots not unlike Emili's that were splattered and dotted with paint, and a loose orange vest that had enough large pockets to carry and transport his art supplies. A scarlet baseball cap messed up his dark, ratty blond hair. He looked like he weighed about as much as Emili. His scrawny face, shifting, quick eyes, and his tension-riddled back made her think he was faster than a mouse when authority figures came by.

He didn't look at Emili or John, but took one glance at Sherlock's distasteful impression of his artwork and snickered. "Part of a new exhibition," he boasted gleefully, capping the spray can. His tag glistened wetly.

"Interesting." Sherlock deadpanned.

Raz spun around and caught a look at John's expression. He sardonically grinned at the blogger. "I call it Urban Bloodlust Frenzy," he taunted, clearly doing it to further bother the doctor.

"Catchy," John stated flatly.

Em bit her lip. She wasn't a huge fan of street art when it didn't serve a purpose. Unless there was a police brutality incident that she wasn't aware of, she didn't understand what the use was in drawing such a crude portrait of the civil servants unless he was just being spiteful.

Raz checked the black watch on his right wrist. "I've got two minutes before a Community Support Officer comes 'round that corner." He nodded to their right in the direction from which the trio had come. "Can we do this while I'm working?" Even as he asked, he bent down to the concrete and lifted two more paint cans. He put one in his vest and started to shake the other.

Instead of answering one way or the other, Sherlock offered his mobile. Raz peered at the photograph, stopped shaking the can, and tossed it at John. The blogger caught it out of impulse from having something chucked at him, and he surveyed the brand name with discomfort. Raz took Sherlock's phone after wiping his fingers on his pants.

"Know the author?" Sherlock asked, cocking his head.

Raz bit on his thumbnail and shook his head. "No." He rotated on his heels so the lighting in the back road was facing the same direction. "Recognize the paint, though. It's like Michigan hardcore propellant. I'd say zinc."

Emili hated to say it, but she was a little bit impressed that he could recognize the kind of paint from a photograph.

"What about the symbols?" The brunet prompted further. "Do you recognize them?"

Raz snorted ( _like the pig-officer,_ Emili pointedly thought) and passed the phone back to her brother. "Not even sure it's a proper language."

Sherlock stared down his sort-of acquaintance sourly. "Two men have been _murdered_ , Raz," he gravely stated. "Deciphering this is the key to finding out who killed them."

"What, and that's all you've got to go on?" The tightening of Sherlock's jaw answered the question for him. Raz pointed to the pocket the phone had disappeared in. "It's hardly much, is it?"

"Yes, go ahead," she sarcastically invited. "Rub it in."

Raz rubbed his hands off on his pants again. "I'll ask around."

"Somebody must know something about it." Sherlock insisted.

Emili agreed that the odds were high that someone else knew what it meant, but she also had to consider that two people connected to it had died already. If she were the third, then she would probably keep her mouth shut for fear that she'd be the next victim.

_"Oi!"_

All at once, the four of them turned to look in the direction of the furious shout. It was a support officer, like Raz had said, in a bright neon yellow vest. His face was pink and he took into a sprint, lunging down the side of the building to reach them. Emili grabbed at John's wrist impulsively to get the hell away, but the doctor just frowned at the cop, puzzled. Emili sighed and let go of him, resigned to staying where they were. Unfortunately, Sherlock and Raz hadn't gotten the memo, because they were both pounding down the street and haring away from the officer. Raz left some of his paint cans behind on the ground.

When the man caught up to them, he was puffing unattractively. He drew himself up high, taller than John and Emili both, and raised a hand to wag a finger at them condescendingly. "What the hell do you think you're doing?! It's the bloody middle of the day! This gallery is a listed public building!"

John's eyes widened as he realized what the problem was. His jaw dropped and he stole a peek at the graffiti. When his eyes went, so did the officers; Emili winced as the man's face turned even darker and his voice went lower in a barely-audible growl.

"No, no, wait, wait, it's not me who painted that." John held both of his hands up to demonstrate his innocence, only to realize that he was still holding the spray paint that Raz had thrown. He looked at his hand, shocked, and dropped it straight to the ground. "We're innocent! I was just holding this. For-"

It was then that he realized they'd been abandoned. He ground his teeth. Emili patted his shoulder.

The officer kicked over the cans left standing up by the wall. "A bit of an enthusiast, are we?"

Emili turned her eyes to John, questioning. The man looked pained and angry, but although his mouth was open and his expression indignant, he had nothing more than he'd already said to refute his involvement. The officer had to have seen Sherlock and Raz running away, but to release them just because they said they hadn't vandalized the building would've been negligent and irresponsible of his duties. People lied all the time. Emili sighed, resigning herself to a trip to the station.

"Look, I'm just going to get my wallet, okay?" She warned peacefully ahead of time. She reached behind her with one hand and fished her wallet out of the back of her jeans. "I have some ID." She opened it and took out the government-sponsored ID with her name and information. She wasn't really supposed to have it, but Mycroft insisted that she have a way to validate who she was if she ever needed to get in contact with him or Anthea. She knew that it could open doors for her, so she carried it on her person. "I guarantee you'll want to contact my legal guardian before you arrest me, so just keep your hand off your baton unless you wanna prove there's a point to this tag here." She indicated Raz's piece while offering her ID card out with one hand.

The man took it skeptically, yanking it out from between her fingers. He looked between John and the card closely, worried that they might take the distraction as an opportunity to bolt. He squinted at the name.

"Mycroft Holmes?" He asked, making a face.

"Yeah," Emili affirmed quickly, nodding. John went along with it, relaxing slightly. Mycroft could make anything go away (even people, Emili suspected, though he refused to dignify that with confirmation or denial). "I'm his little sister. _And_ I'm a minor. You take us back to the station, right, and you call Mycroft before you decide to start laying on any charges."

The man shot his hand down quickly. Emili was worried briefly that he was going to throw her ID card out of annoyance. "You've got to be kidding me-!" He started to burst lividly. A vein in his throat popped out. "Being some government employee's sister don't give you the right to go 'round defacing public property!" John's shoulders slumped. Emili rolled her eyes up at the sky. "Does that mean my kid brother can go tagging his name all across the city?"

"Like I said," she repeated, forcing herself to be patient and calm. "Call my brother."

* * *

Emili had listened to Katy Perry, watched teen dramas, and seen western movies with her dad, and yet none of them prepared her for how utterly _boring_ a holding cell was. After being fingerprinted, she was put in a holding cell. They separated her from John – they said it was because they didn't want them to conspire any ideas. Emili was pretty sure they just felt like being petty. She rolled her eyes so hard she swore she almost sprained them.

For the next couple of hours, she entertained herself as well as she could. They'd taken her phone when they searched her with a metal detector wand and she didn't have anything else on her person that she generally considered entertaining. She didn't even have any gum to chew. If the bench against the wall had appeared to be cleaned at least semi-regularly, she might have tried to take a nap and blow through the time.

Altogether, she wasn't worried that Mycroft _wouldn't_ get her out. Although he might be horribly amused by the issue, if it got back to the Holmes' matriarch – which it _definitely_ would, if Emili found out he left her here longer than necessary – he would never hear the end of it. It would be ten years later and still brought up at family dinners. She was just starting to get irritated that he was really taking some liberties and biding his time, when all she'd done was get framed for something because she wanted to help stop a killer. It didn't seem fair. She was quickly figuring out that life wasn't fair but she was a teenager and she was allowed to be temperamental.

There was no clock for her to look at, so she had no accurate way of gauging how much time had passed before the door to the holding block clinked open. The tread of the booking sergeant's shoes were worn down so that they didn't make much noise but for a tiny squeak on the linoleum, but the elegant clacking of polished, firm, sophisticated loafers made her open her eyes and look as far to the right as she could. After several more paces of that distinct gait, the girl saw Mycroft come into sight, along with the sergeant.

The sergeant looked disgruntled and gave her a disgruntled, almost mocking look, like he was judging her hard for having her rich big brother clean up her mess. Mycroft looked like he'd come off of a TV set, his suit jacket worth more than everything Emili had on combined, his posture perfect and his outfit immaculate. The worst part, though, wasn't what the sergeant clearly thought: it was the awful smirk that her oldest brother wore, the one that promised she wasn't going to be allowed to just forget this had happened.

Em stayed quiet while the sergeant slipped the key into the lock and opened up the cell. It was roomy enough for one person for a couple of hours, but it needed a good clean and she couldn't wait to escape. The sergeant took his key, gave Mycroft a lingering stare full of distrust and a willingness not to cooperate, and left with a grunt about getting the old one.

"What about John?" Emili asked after the door back to the main body of the precinct had closed.

"Being taken care of," Mycroft answered primly without hesitation. Now that they had some privacy, pretenses were dropped. His professional, polite demeanor matched the smirk he'd had – gloating and arrogant and kind of bossy. "Out with a warning, I should think. Nothing work putting on any permanent records. However, if you insist on pursuing this decidedly un-civic pastime, might I suggest that eyesore beside the gym on the east side?"

Emili pursed her lips and tried not to let it get to her. She failed. Mycroft knew how to tease and he knew how to be rude, whether or not he ever liked to admit that he did, to an extent, know how to socialize like a human being. "You know perfectly well that we didn't do what we were arrested for," she accused, glaring and crossing her arms.

"Sister mine, how are you ever going to learn responsibility if I continue to pay your bail?" He asked her, his taunts wrapped up classily with a bow of feigned concern.

"You've seen my sketching." She deadpanned back at him. "Do you _really_ think I'm somehow that good with a spray can?"

Mycroft finally let his infuriating smirk fade from his face, looking down to his toes briefly while he let out a satisfied chuckle. "No, I suppose not," he allowed, looking back up with a smaller, but no less aggravating, smile. "Your motor skills could use some improvement."

Emili had known it would be bad, but she wasn't sufficiently prepared. Even though she _knew_ he was trying to get under her skin and make her feel embarrassed, it was still _working._ Mycroft had a talent of making people uncomfortably second-guess themselves, she supposed, which came in handy at his job at times but was a real unnecessary kick in the pants when it came to family life.

Him criticizing _her_ of not having motor skills in a jab really hit something home with her. Maybe she got in trouble, but at least she was out _doing_ something instead of fielding calls from a desk all day. She doubted he'd ever gotten his own hands dirty a day in his life. What right did he have to start passing judgments on how she handled herself?

"Says the ass that never lifts a finger," she muttered rebelliously, feeling her face heat up angrily.

Emili thought that she had been quiet enough not for him to hear, but apparently, she was wrong. Mycroft's voice sounded arch in that way it took when he was insulted and wanted to behave as though he was above taking offense. "I assure you that I lifted several fingers," he told her, looking to the top of her head closely. "At least five, in fact, as I signed to assure my power of attorney."

There was a long pause from both of them. Mycroft awaited a retort, while Emili tried to figure out what she could say (if anything) that wouldn't give up her higher ground. Mycroft kind of had her there – he took care of her, made sure she had everything she needed. She probably owed him a little more for that than just what she did, telling his parents he was a doting, loving, affectionate figure in her life.

"Yeah, well…" she mumbled, sighed, and uncrossed her arms, letting them drop down so her hands hung at her thighs. "Thanks for getting me out, I guess," she said quietly, regretting that she had to be the bigger person. "Couldn't you have been any faster?"

Mycroft's smirk grew by a fraction. "I did try, but it's very hard to move quickly when I have no practice lifting my fingers."

Emili just sighed and kept her head down. She knew when she had lost. She was getting out of jail free – literally, she didn't have to pay anything and it wasn't going to come back to haunt her when she applied for schools or jobs. Mycroft didn't have to completely wipe it from her record, so she at least owed him a few wins with just the token fussing.

When she didn't rise up to the bait, though, the pause became uncomfortable, with neither of them knowing what to say if they weren't going to bicker back and forth. Mycroft claimed she irritated him like no one else, but Emili wasn't sure that was quite it. She was convinced he actually enjoyed the bickering. She was quick enough to keep up with it, social enough to know which buttons were off-limits for pushing, and familiar enough to read his reactions and tell how she was doing. She gathered from watching him at work that not a lot of people were very comfortable talking back to Mycroft Holmes, so having some free human interaction with someone who he couldn't fire was likely enjoyable.

They waited for the sergeant to come back with John so that they could leave. Mycroft led the way back to the lobby of the precinct and Emili chose a seat by the door, where she could get a slightly fresher breath of slightly less stale air. Mycroft put the tip of his long umbrella down into the thin carpet and leaned lightly on it, hand wrapped tightly around the grip.

"Comment est votre cours de langage?" Mycroft asked, looking down at her briefly and then turning his head away to survey the surroundings. She was certain he'd looked around at least five times already and could have made a very close guess at the receptionists' relationship status, zodiac sign, and movie preferences.

Although she was surprised, Emili played along. What else could she do? This was part of the deal, anyway. "C'est ça va, je fais bien," she answered with a halfhearted shrug. Mycroft's words came out more smoothly and faster, where Emili had to take a second to think about them and she didn't have the accent down. Still, she understood the spoken language and she coherently responded in it. "Il m'aide que mes frères le parlent," she added halfheartedly, feeling like it was pretty pathetic if she couldn't demonstrate a slightly higher level of vocabulary than 'I do well.'

Mycroft nodded in some sort of vague approval. She sat and he stood and someone else came by in handcuffs, being nagged by a young woman that followed, though not in handcuffs. Life went on. Emili wondered what was taking so long to get John out.

"We're pretty awful at the sibling thing," she noted oddly.

"We're still on speaking terms," Mycroft added his point of view quietly. With a long inhale, he switched his umbrella to his other hand. "From my experience, we've been doing rather well." Emili did have to nod agreement at that. No one had to kidnap her just to get an update on how her life is going, although she was pretty sure she would take it to that extent if it meant keeping a boyfriend from meeting her unbelievable family. "Speaking of, where is that brother of ours?"

"God knows," Emili grumbled. At the reminder of Sherlock's flight, she felt like her tentatively neutral mood had been soured. "He ran off and left me and John with incriminating evidence."

"Yes, I am noticing a trend." Mycroft sighed irritably and vented. He would never admit that that was what he was doing, but when he extolled the many faults of someone, he was venting, just like Sherlock vented about how stupid Anderson was or how uptight and proper Mycroft acted. "He has _no_ sense of responsibility," Mycroft accused. Emili kept her mouth shut on that one. "And he _still_ thinks he shouldn't have been cut off."

On that one, it was hard to hold her tongue. Sherlock had never really cared about money, she didn't think – not since it became possible for him to be content without drugs. "He doesn't care about money," she defended loyally. She thought back to the huge check John got from Sebastian and how Sherlock had totally dismissed it. Someone who bothered much with money wouldn't blow it off like that. "He's found something better to do with his time than coke."

"Prancing around the city, dragging around a formerly-crippled army doctor and a little girl too curious for her own good?" Emili looked up to tell him off for the rude epithets, but instead snorted indelicately. He had his nose wrinkled like he'd smelled something foul. It was a funny expression to see on her prim and composed brother. "Better?" He repeated and canted his head from one direction to the other. "That depends on how you think of him now."

"He helps people," Em still remained on Sherlock's side of the argument. Although there were things she liked about Mycroft, Sherlock was her preferred one. He was on her less, and though he didn't look out for her as much, Emili didn't really want a parental figure. She wanted a friend. "He's not risking his life in an alley to get a fix, so yeah, I call that better."

"Helping people." Again, Mycroft said it after her like she'd made brussels sprouts for dinner. "And that's why you're letting yourself be led like a blind puppy!"

"I'm not!" She protested, snapping her head up to look at him, startled. They had been having what felt like a serious talk about Sherlock, but suddenly things were getting focused back on her, and Mycroft was basically on the offensive.

"What were you to have done if I had been out of the country?" Mycroft posed to her, flexing his hand around the handle of his umbrella. She saw the tendons in his hand move and the way his knuckles were pale. "Wasted away in a jail cell?" He guessed distastefully. "Our parents are very strongly hoping you turn out more like me than like Sherlock. I would hate to inform them of your recent decent into juvenile delinquency."

Emili ground her teeth together. Sometimes she hated the position she was in, living out of 221A above her brother and his roommate, because it gave Mycroft that control over her. He could take it away – worse, he could inform someone else who would take it away and whine to everyone about how bad of an idea it had been the whole time.

Mycroft seemed to sense that he had touched a nerve, and he continued with barely a long enough space between points for Emili to take one long, deep breath and sigh. "Continue with your grades and you can continue as you wish." He said, his tone shifting to one far closer to boredom, like Em was accustomed to. "Be more discerning in the choices you make. You may not need to be a role model for Liza, but there are still people who have personal interests in your securities."

Emili cocked her head and stared right up at him, trying to make eye contact. "Am I talking with one of them now?" She asked seriously, managing to lock irises with him when he looked down while sweeping his eyes over the chairs, debating over whether or not he wanted to take one after all.

Mycroft didn't smile. He never let himself smile because of other people, unless he was smiling because he got pleasure or entertainment out of their failure. So it certainly wasn't a smile that Emili saw. If anything, it was a muscle twitch that happened to make his lips look like they were fractionally smiling for less than a second. That was all it was.

"If you can't work that out for yourself, Manta, maybe I should return to calling you a pink fish." Mycroft suggested, somehow sounding less condescending than his words in a ridiculous, once-in-a-lifetime twist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Apologies for the unintentional hiatus.

**Author's Note:**

> Sherlock and its characters, settings, and copyrighted plots do not belong to me. Emili Holmes is my intellectual property.


End file.
